Talend’s products are made possible through the efforts of a committed, enthusiastic, international group of engineers.

When I say that, most people think I’m referring to our internal research and development teams…and for good reason!  I’ve never seen people build software as quickly as they do.  However, I’m talking about the thousands of people who build millions of lines of open source code that our products are based on.  That code allows us to build more functional, stable, and efficient products, far more rapidly than we otherwise could.

There are a few ways we know how to say “thank you”, but the best way is to give something back.  That’s why many members of our research and development team contribute heavily to open source projects as part of their work, and I’d like to highlight a few of them over the next few weeks.

First, I’d like to introduce Jean-Baptiste Onofré.  Jean-Baptiste has been a regular contributor to Apache Software Foundation projects for several years, and he currently works on Apache Karaf, ServiceMix, ACE, and Camel, which are critical components in Talend ESB.

Jean-Baptiste is also this week’s Highlighted Community Member on TalendForge.  To learn more about him, take a look.  Also, you can follow him on his blog (http://blog.nanthrax.net) or on Twitter (@jbonofre).

This week we announced our latest design studio from Talend. As you’ll recall we launched Talend ESB earlier this year, which is based on Apache Camel, CXF, Karaf and ActiveMQ. This time we are focusing on democratizing the ESB and in doing so, making it easy for Web Services developers to solve application integration challenges in minutes.

As with all our products, our goal is to present a common experience and look-and-feel to our users, thus making is easier for someone to start with one tool and as their needs involve, quickly get up to speed with the next tool in the Talend portfolio.

I experimented with Talend ESB Studio this weekend and I’m very impressed. Impressed that I could quickly get an example up and running in minutes and then see it running on Talend ESB.  I am also very pleased that we only started to build Talend ESB Studio this year and we’ve already got a product ready for download that is really useful.

There are 2 really nice features that I believe are game changers for Apache Camel development.

• The first one is that you can completely develop your application (a Camel “route”) with the Eclipse-based designer and get on-screen statistics as you test the execution of your Camel routes. Quite often when writing integration logic, you can miss the fact that although you application has read, say 1,000 messages, you’ve only processed 990 of them. “Where did the other 10 messages go?” Well, with Talend ESB Studio, you can see the actual route that an individual message took, based on the EIPs and routing logic you’ve designed. This is very neat. Of course for users of other Talend products, it’s something that you have been used to for some time. I’ve attached a screen shot of a very simple example that shows an EIP (Enterprise Integration Pattern) called a “MessageFilter”. The MessageFilter acts on the content of the input files that are read from the “inbox” and sends them to 1 of 3 endpoints. Within Apache Camel, you can specify numerous different types of endpoints or what are called “components” (http, file, ftp, jms, cxf, etc – see http://camel.apache.org/component.html) which are specified using a URI. I’m using “file” for my example here. You can see that that we simply filtering the files based on a simple string: “Paris” or “Dublin” get specific endpoints, otherwise it goes to the “other” endpoint.

• The second thing to highlight is that you can export your “route” as an OSGi bundle and run it directly on top of Talend ESB. You often hear developers explain the virtues of OSGi such as modularity, application life-cycle support, dependency resolution - but when you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll hear some war-stories about how getting the OSGi bundle configuration ‘just right’ can take lots of time, even for relatively competent OSGi developers. Well, again, Talend ESB Studio makes this task pretty simple, by automatically resolving the Route dependencies and creating the bundle for you.

As always we are very interested in your feedback and hearing your suggestions for improving the product. You can download the free Talend ESB Studio from here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to post a question to the Talend Forum under the Talend ESB section.

Fabrice

I am very proud of Talend’s position as a key open source company. As Talend, we see open source playing a major role in the success of our customers and also in how it’s changing the nature of the Enterprise. Of course, there would not be open source without open source community. The community is where the collective wisdom and shared interests help drive innovations and creativity.

Just this week, Talend has joined the Java Community Process (JCP), to actively get involved in the next version of the JAX-RS specification which defines all about REST and the APIs that developers use to build Java-based RESTful applications. We are excited about this. For one, it helps maintain Talend ESB on the latest REST APIs that are being adopted across the various implementations. Secondly, Talend is a major contributor and user of Apache CXF and we felt that the REST support needs to be maintained to the latest specification and innovations. We have significant ongoing investments within Apache CXF, with a significant part our products embedding this technology for Web Services support, so it makes perfect sense for us to continue to invest in making sure CXF is on the cutting edge of new innovations. Not only will we continue to innovate, but we feel the collective efforts of the JCP members with help improve quality and compatibility across all implementations.

Sergey Berozkin will be Talend’s representative at the JCP. Sergey is a major contributor to the JAX-RS implementation within Apache CXF. He’s crazy about all things REST and will help the JCP defining the latest specification.

When we founded Talend, one of the things that we agreed, from the get-go, was that Talend would not only use open source but also invest in community-based development in the wider open source ecosystem. We have been involved with OW2 since its foundation and Cédric, Talend’s CTO, is a board member of OW2. We are also major contributors to Apache including CXF, Camel, ServiceMix, Karaf, Santuario, ActiveMQ - with a number of Talend team members chairing these projects. We also continue to play an active role in the Eclipse Foundation.  Talend’s participation into JCP is the latest of these contributions, but of course not the last one!

Fabrice

The other day, I was riding the Heathrow Express train from London Heathrow to Paddington. It’s a great train service, fast, reliable, and convenient.  The windows of the carriages carry a sticker that advertises free Wifi service from T-Mobile. Unfortunately, as anyone who rides that train on a regular basis will tell you, this free service is a legend.  When you can get a signal, you can’t get to the login page; and if you get through the login page, the signal will drop after a few minutes.  Bottom line: Wifi on the Heathrow Express may be free, but it does not work and it’s useless.

A lot of free software is like this.  Good marketing will get you to download it; you will have to bear with numerous ads to get through download, installation, and activation. Only to realize that either it does not work at all, or that to do the stuff you need it for, you have to buy the “advanced” version (and you’re so lucky, there is a special discount this week!).

Why is open source different? Well, firstly, open source is not free as in free beer (or free Wifi…), it’s free as in free speech.  A lot has been written on the topic, so I’ll just say this: the most important value of open source is open-ness, not cost-less-ness. Everything stems from there.

• Open source works: precisely because it’s open, an open source project that does not work as advertised won’t stay around for long.  If all you’re downloading is adware or crippleware, the community will soon be aware of it, and make sure everyone knows it too. If it was poorly designed or built, same story. In both cases, the project will simply sink into oblivion.

• Open source is transparent: whether you are dealing with a community-driven project or a vendor-led project, transparency is key.  The 451 Group released a while back their open core transparency test, and out of the 14 open core vendors surveyed, not a single one had failed to clearly indicate the differences between their free and commercial versions.

Many detractors of open source (often the same ones who compete against open source products) refer to their open source competitors with a dismissive “you get what you pay for”. Some of these companies will go one step further and decide to release a free version of their product. Not open source – free as in “free Wifi on the Heathrow Express”.  And in this case, guess what?  The saying “you get what you pay for” does apply. For these companies, “free” is only a marketing strategy.  They have no intention whatsoever to offer any value for free, only to hook potential clients.  I can think of several examples, some of them right down my aisle.

At the end of the day, if it’s free and you can’t use it, it’s crap!

Yves

For the second year in a row, Talend is sponsoring Cloud Computing Expo in New York City.  But this year, we came with a major announcement in our back pocket: the just-launched Talend Cloud, a cloud-enabled unified integration platform.Built on the foundation of the Talend Unified Platform that we premiered last month, Talend Cloud is the next step in our mission to unify data management and application integration.

In the past couple weeks, we have spoken to numerous industry analysts and journalists. The feedback on Talend Cloud has been overwhelmingly positive.  Everyone is telling us we are right on target, and at the right time.  After experimenting for a couple years, organizations are now ready to go mission critical with cloud deployments, and integration issues are more critical than ever.  Especially when dealing with hybrid environments - combinations of on-premise, private cloud, public cloud and SaaS.

On the show floor, we have been discussing Talend Cloud for the past 2 days, and again the feedback from the audience is great, confirming our expectations that this solution comes at the right time.

What are the key points about Talend Cloud?

• Integration in hybrid environments, bringing together on-premise applications, databases & systems deployed in the cloud (private or public), and Software as a Service such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite.
• Advanced and comprehensive connectivity to all cloud and non-cloud technologies.
• Ability to deploy the integration platform itself in the cloud. This is true of course of the complete platform but also of individual components (data integration, data quality, master data management, enterprise service bus).

I will be back on this blog to provide further feedback as we receive reactions and coverage.

Yves

PS: I was interviewed by the Talend Channel on this topic, have a look!

In November 2010, after a brief engagement period, Talend and Sopera got married.  With Silver Lake Sumeru officiating, and joined by their close family and friends in the VC and open source community, the two companies began a new and exciting journey together.

Now - only six months later - Talend and Sopera are pleased to announce the birth of four healthy new products.  The normal gestation period is usually a bit longer than that, but open source companies are used to breaking rules that many people take for granted!

According to the official press release, the new products were named in strict accordance with tradition:

• Talend ESB Standard Edition v4.0
• Talend Open Studio v4.2
• Talend Open Profiler v4.2
• Talend MDM Community Edition v4.2

The newborns are undeniably part of the same family because, like all monozygotic siblings, they share the same DNA.  While developing unique personalities of their own, they will always benefit from a powerful and unique compatibility with one another.

It’s a memorable day in the world of open source!  The integrated family of application integration and data management products will soon, despite its age, rival established products and democratize the world of integration.

Best wishes to the happy family!

Yves

Note: I almost put “finally” into the title, but thought better – don’t want to start another blog fight with my friend Andy. Plus, it would be unfair and incorrect.

Earlier this month, Gartner published their report “Cool Vendors in Application and Integration Platforms, 2011”. This Cool Vendors report singles out emerging vendors that address the application and integration platform markets by providing core enabling and integrated application infrastructure offerings. See our announcement there.

Talend is among the few vendors that Gartner identified as being “Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.” Yes, these are the conditions to be Cool nowadays.

Now, without disclosing the content of the report (which would be a copyright violation), it’s probably OK for me to reveal that the reason why Gartner thought we are cool, is linked to our acquisition of Sopera in late 2010, and the recent announcements around our vision and plans for a unified integration platform, that brings together data management and application integration.  We briefed on our plans Gartner analyst Jess Thompson (who wrote the Talend section of this report), and it’s clear he understands the value proposition of this unification and how unique it is.

Before being Cool however, Talend was already a Visionary.  For two years in a row, Gartner positioned us in the Visionaries quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Data Integration. This was cool in itself but did not make us a Cool Vendor – now done.

I was boasting recently about our Wall of Fame – now we have another accolade to hang on it.

Yves

Recently, I had a fantastic discussion with DJ Walker-Morgan from The H Open Source about Talend, Open Core and Community. DJ asked me a few pretty tough questions about how we manage to balance the needs of our community with those of our business.

I’d like to share an excerpt:

The H: What drives Talend to go for an open core model?

RT: The open core model allows us to bring powerful technology to the communities that need it while ensuring that the company is healthy enough to maintain a competitive product.

There’s a delicate balance, though; the features in our commercial edition are specifically designed to be useful to large companies with complex projects, but more than the community at large might need. In other words, our product strategy is to create commercial demand for our enterprise features, which fulfill specific use cases that are likely to be uninteresting for non-commercial users.

The H: But this brings up an interesting question. One of the advantages of open source, considering the whole life-cycle rather than the acquisition end of it, is a lack of lock-in and the ability for a customer to disengage from a vendor with less penalty. What you describe is a situation where those open source benefits are not available to enterprise customers. How do you address that for those customers who do go the enterprise route?

RT: Our commitment to open source isn’t just a marketing strategy; Talend Open Studio was our first product, and continues to influence everything we do. Because the open core model allows us to earn a premium for specialized features, we’ve been able to grow and expand our company very quickly and, consequently, release large amounts of open source technology in a short amount of time.

The hardest thing about building an open core product is making informed decisions about which features are universal and which apply only in commercial situations. In order for an open core company to be effective, that needs to be a topic of ongoing debate. We spend a lot of time and energy fine-tuning that part of our strategy because we understand that, if we get it wrong, we jeopardize everything we’ve accomplished so far.

DJ has a transcript of the full discussion on his site, The H Online. You can read it here.

Ross

I like to call it our Wall of Fame… It’s the page on the Talend web site where we list all the recognition and accolades we have received from various publications, analyst firms, influencer sites, trade shows, etc.  In case you did not notice, most of them are also referenced on our News & Events page, and pop up at the bottom of the home page.

The past weeks have been good for our Wall of Fame which was starting to gather (virtual) dust after being last updated when Gartner published their Magic Quadrant for Data Integration in December.

• In March, the Momentum Index ranked 96 venture-backed open source software companies. And Talend ranked #1 with a Momentum Index of 89.5, because “The Open Source Integration company is clearly taking off. With backing from Silver Lake, and significant scale, we think Talend could be an IPO candidate.”

• Later the same month, Lead411 released of its Hottest Companies in Silicon Valley award.
  Talend was recognized as “one of the largest pure play vendors of open source software, offering a breadth of middleware solutions that address both data management and application integration needs.”

• And then, just 2 weeks ago, leading UK newspaper The Telegraph nominated Talend to the Telegraph Tech Start-Up 100: Class of 2011 - an attempt to create the most authoritative and trustworthy ranking of promising technology start-ups in Europe. Talend was nominated in the category Enterprise: Security, Storage, Collaboration, Databases.

The good thing?  These awards were unsolicited.  We never filled out forms, nor did we pay to enter in contests. We found out about them either through Google alerts, or when we were contacted by the publication to let us know we were in.  These awards are the pure product of Talend’s visibility and notoriety.  And this is great!

Yves

I had the honor of being invited to chair the judging panel for Start West 2011, a series of Capital and Innovation meetings organized on March 23, 2011 with the objective of connecting innovative project developers with professional and private investors.

Start West has been organized for 11 years by the Nantes Atlantique Financial Center, the Nantes Saint-Nazaire Chamber of Commerce and RETIS, in partnership with OSEO, Deloitte, In Extenso and AFIC. This year, the event also profited from the support of the Brittany and Pays-de-la-Loire Regions, Rennes Métropole and the Rennes Chamber of Commerce.

After 11 years, Start West has become a national benchmark event, drawing together project developers, investors, large companies and innovation specialists. 20 projects from the information and communications technology, health, software, energy/environment and recreation sectors were presented this year, totaling in about 10 million € in potential funding.

The judging panel that I chaired singled out three specific projects:

•  The “Start-up” Award: OPENSKYMAP provides innovative monitoring and real-time analysis services for international air traffic (www.radarvirtuel.com). In the medium-term, OPENSKYMAP aspires to improve its Internet service to create a true benchmark media website for the air travel world.
•  The “Marketing” Award: NEOSTEO, since August 2009, has been designing, manufacturing and selling implantable medical devices for trauma and orthopedic surgery (osteosynthesis). www.neosteo.com.
•  The “Judge’s favorite” Award: GLISS-SPEED. Created by AQUALEO, which manufactures and markets a small electric motor boat, accessible to the general public without a permit, GLISS-SPEED is the first fully electric water kart. www.gliss-speed.com.

These three projects clearly illustrate that Western France entrepreneurs have the ability to innovate.  They don’t lack energy or imagination, and we hope that the awards that they were given offer the visibility needed not only to finance their development, but also to introduce them to prospective clients.

Meanwhile, after my participation in the Start West conferences, discussions and judging panel, I have the following thoughts and reflections to offer.

First, I was pleasantly “surprised” by the enthusiasm and professionalism of the players in the innovation sector in Western France, a region predominantly noted for being a university region.  It is true that being split between Paris and California, I tend to forget that life also exists outside of my own geographic sphere… I know that my “surprise” may shock some provincial residents, but it is clear that we would all gain by visiting our colleagues in the provinces more often.  France’s heart of business is unquestionably located in Paris; however, the provinces contain numerous other vital organs, without which the innovation sector would not exist.  The companies presented at Start West are living proof.

Also, this year Start Westwas marked by the investors’ concerns regarding impending legislative changes, particularly in terms of tax exemption.  Since these are huge developments that will certainly have significant effects on the future for investors, it seems to me that such meetings should not solely focus on this topic.

During the different Start West conferences and presentations, I noticed a sense of frustration among various players in the innovation sector: the Regions are frustrated that they only rarely recover their stakes when they invest in a company, and investors are frustrated by the restraints imposed by regulatory limits.

Yet, it seems to me that the system is working pretty well today.  The Regions now have an absolutely crucial role in start-ups, and if they do not directly recover their return on investment, they still contribute to job creation in their territory, which is not only essential, but also completely inherent to their organization.

Meanwhile, investors, and particularly Business Angels, need to stress the added value that they can offer: their experience and entrepreneurial know-how, apart from the financial considerations.

Sometimes, during our discussions, I had the impression that each company was trying to surpass their own trade, which in my opinion seems to be a dangerous approach.  The French often praise and admire Silicon Valley, which they consider “the El Dorado” where every innovative company dreams of being located.  I simply want to remind you all that in this valley in California, there is no tax exemption mechanism for investments; entrepreneurs, their partners and investors primarily focus on creating value… while accepting the existence of the established ecosystem, based on well-defined regulations and duties.  It seems pointless to attempt to challenge this system that has repeatedly proven its worth.

Lastly, I was very surprised, on reading the business plans of the presented companies, that French entrepreneurs almost never include the international dimension in their projections.  Personally, I think that this is a mistake.  First of all, for the investor, this limitation to the national territory may discredit the entrepreneur and translate as a lack of ambition.  Secondly, I think it eliminates any chance of developing the new business: in the twenty first century, the entrepreneurial “playground” for new technology is either global or it simply doesn’t exist at all.  Talend’s strength lies in the fact that from the start, Fabrice and I considered the international dimension as a non-negligible step for our development.  A company like AQUALEO, which markets the GLISS SPEED, must internationalize its strategy.  Besides, given the local context of California (beaches, surfing, taste for sports, etc.), it would be a shame not to at least try!

In conclusion, I want to thank everyone who helped organize Start West, especially Pierre Tiers and his team, the RETIS network, Loïg Chesnais Girard, Chair  for Economic Development in Brittany and Pierre Villemur, representative for the innovation mission in Brittany.  They hold this event every year, which to my knowledge is one of a kind, and allowed me to clear my mind for two days in contact with new start-ups and the innovators of tomorrow.  I would like to add a special mention to OSEO, which plays a vital role in this innovation ecosystem and without which it simply would not exist.

I also would like to thank the members of the judging panel who demonstrated a great capacity for listening and understanding, showing immense respect for the entrepreneurs who came to present their projects.

I truly hope to attend other such events in the near future.  Being an entrepreneur implicates an undying curiosity and openness, and these meetings are a great way to quench our thirst.

Bertrand