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Talend brings open source to enterprise data integration

The enterprise open source software parade continues with Talend, which is bringing its data integration software. Talend Open Studio v2.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

The enterprise open source software parade continues with Talend, which is bringing its data integration software. Talend Open Studio v2.0 generates data integration processes in Java and offers Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) functions for data warehousing and analytics, working on scale out, commodity hardware grids. It includes over 100 native connectors for common enterprise applications. On the operational side, Talend handles data migration, data loading, synchronization or replication of databases and data exchange between systems.

The team, based in France, worked on the product for three years, and released it on SourceForge and Eclipse in October last year, said Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend. So far, 60,000 users have downloaded Talend Open Studio, 45 percent from the U.S., he added.

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Talend's Open Studio Job Designer offers a graphical and a functional view of integration processes

Talend joins the parade of open source and commercial open source providers, led by open source  Red Hat/JBoss, Novell, MySQL and Sun and smaller disrupters such as SugarCRM, Greenplum, MuleSource, Scalix, Zimbra, Digium, Alfresco, Socialtext, EnterpriseDB, Ingres, CollabNet, Hyperic, Qlusters, JasperSoft, SpikeSource and RadView, seeking to disrupt the proprietary, expensive incumbents. Talend's competitors include stalwarts such as IBM, Oracle and Informatica.

“Most companies can’t afford a commercial, proprietary version. They are expensive and hard to deploy. We want to democratize integration,” Diard said. Talend is not offering a commercial open source version (which often includes a bit of proprietary code as part of the distribution), charging only for support and professional services.

The challenges for Talend, and other open source enterprise upstarts, is proving to customers that its claims to provide a more scalable, faster and less-costly alternative to the proprietary suites from the incumbents and staffing up to service customers. The company is working with systems integrators, such as Cap Gemini, and OEM partners, such as JasperSoft to build out its business beyond its European beachhead. Talend is also part of an effort by Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a non-profit consortium, to create interoperability standards for open-source business software.

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