Another Open-Source Option: Data Integration

Open-source options for solution providers and their customers continue to grow beyond infrastructure software like operating systems and application servers: Monday Talend began shipping a new version of its open-source data integration software that competes against commercial products from Informatica, IBM and others.

The new release, Talend Open Studio v2.0, offers new Java language generation and data transformation capabilities and connectors to more data sources. Talend executives are also recruiting business partners in vertical industries with data integration expertise to work with the new product.

"For solution providers, it's going to give them a low-cost tool to build data integration systems to help their customers access multiple data sources," said Michael Gould, Forrester Research senior analyst. Because Talend is open source, ISVs and solution providers can easily expand the product and develop connectors to data sources not provided by the vendor, Goulde said.

There has been an explosion of open-source products hitting the market in the past year ranging from applications, to business intelligence tools, to systems management software like that recently debuted by Zenoss. But data integration has largely remained dominated by proprietary commercial products, Gould said. Talend shipped the first generally available version of its software last October after several years of research and development work.

To date, the data integration software market has been led by vendors such as Ascential -- which IBM acquired in 2005 for $1.1 billion -- and Informatica. Recently Oracle increased its presence in the market by acquiring Sunopsis for an undisclosed sum. Business intelligence software vendors Business Objects, Cognos and SAS Institute also offer data integration products.

Demand for data integration capabilities has been on the rise thanks to exploding volumes of data within businesses and the growing number of operational data sources companies have scattered throughout their organizations. At the same time, regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing businesses to exercise more control over dispersed financial data.

The need to integrate disparate IT systems after corporate mergers and acquisitions is also driving demand, saidTalend co-founder and president Bertrand Diard, noting that as of March downloads of the first release of the company's open-source software had reached 60,000.

Talend makes its software available through the open-source GPL v.2 license and generates revenue by selling technical support, consulting, and training services.

Diard said established data integration software vendors have traditionally focused on large businesses while Talend's software can be used by small, midsize and large organizations. Competing vendors generally offer products that evolved from ETL (extract, transform and load) technology used to move data from one source to another (such as from a transactional system into a data warehouse) in batches. While Diard says Talend's software does that, the company is particularly focusing on the need for moving operational data from system to another in real time.

Talend lets its channel partners manage relationships with their customers and charges partners for technical support, consulting and training services it provides their clients, Diard said.

Talend's software offers a graphical development environment that the company says improves developer productivity. It's metadata-driven design and execution features and real-time debugging capabilities also speed up development. The product's grid-processing architecture and business-oriented process modeling functions provide scalability that's two- to five-times greater than proprietary products, Diard said.

The new release allows users to generate Java code, in contrast to the first release that only generated Perl and SQL code. It also leverages the engine within relational databases to process large volumes of data. And it offers a greater number of data source connectors, including connectors for Sybase and IBM DB2 databases, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM applications, and LDAP directory services.