Talend Attracts VC Funding For Open-Source Technology

Company:

Headquarters: Los Altos, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Talend Open Studio

Year Founded: 2005

Number of Channel Partners: 150 worldwide, 50 in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Business Process Consultant

Why You Should Care: Talend is using the open-source model to bring the expense of data integration software down to a level that most companies can afford.

The Lowdown: There's an explosion of information emanating from multiple data sources within companies, and integrating that data between various applications and systems is a challenge that many businesses have yet to tackle successfully.

That's mainly because products from proprietary data integration vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Informatica are too expensive for many companies. That reality, combined with the nose-diving economy, has relegated many organizations to the data integration sidelines. Talend, which bills itself as the first open-source provider of data integration products, is changing the economics of the market. Talend's flagship Open Studio product has been downloaded more than 3.3 million times since its launch in October 2006, according to Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing for Talend.

"Companies often have data all over the place, which means it's difficult for organizations to leverage their data sets," de Montcheuil said.

Talend offers Open Studio through the General Public License and makes money from selling

technical support, consulting and training services. Talend also sells a subscription-based product called Integration Suite that's aimed at enterprises with large development teams, de Montcheuil said.

"Integration Suite makes it possible to push data integration processes to multiple servers across the information systems, and to see all integration processes as they are running and pinpoint anything that goes wrong," said de Montcheuil. For this product, Talend charges $5,000 annually per developer seat.

Converting free downloads into actual revenue is no easy task, but in the past year Talend has signed up about 400 paying customers, said Montcheuil. Talend has also attracted the attention of venture capitalists, and last month the company secured $12 million in Series C financing, pushing its total VC funding over the $20 million mark.

Talend uses a bifurcated business model that includes elements of direct and indirect sales, but the company doesn't provide development services, leaving that to its strategic integrator partners, Montcheuil noted.

"We're not a consulting organization; we prefer to focus on growing the software business," said Montcheuil. "Our partners that are close to customers know their business and are in a better position than we are to deliver services."

Alberto Saavedra, national sales director for Systech Solutions, a Portland, Ore.-based VAR, says Talend's data integration tools meet the needs of 90 percent of his customers at a fraction of the cost of proprietary vendors' products. "We look at Talend as a fresh approach to data integration, and one that quickly yields performance gains once it's installed," he said.