News

Talend Enhances Open-Source Data Integration App

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 23, 2007

The company, which is one of the founding members of the Open Solutions Alliance, has developed its product to address the data integration needs of enterprises without vendor lock-in. Enterprises have typically had to maintain expensive proprietary solutions from multiple vendors over the years. It's particularly left smaller companies with fewer resources in a lurch.

"What we want to do at Talend is to make data integration tools available to enterprises of all sizes," said Yves de Montcheuil, Talend's vice president of marketing.

Talend's software integrates data between various applications and databases. However, it is not a business process management tool, de Montcheuil explained.

In making its solution open source, Talend chose to donate Open Studio to the community, and the product is offered via a no-cost GPL version 2 license. Under this license agreement, Talend Open Studio can't be embedded into other solutions without getting Talend's permission first. Talend Open Studio is currently embedded in a solution from JasperSoft under an OEM deal, de Montcheuil said.

Talend offers technical support for its software, as well as indemnification assurances for CEOs and expert consulting. In addition, the company has a partnership program.

"We also offer training via partners," de Montcheuil said. "We are going to announce a U.S. partner program soon. Partners will be trained and certified by Talend."

Talend, which is based in France, recently opened its new U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.

About 45 percent of Talend Open Studio downloads occurred in the United States -- and that happened without any marketing, de Montcheuil said. The product has had more than 60,000 downloads worldwide in its six months of existence.

He added that about 60 percent of Talend Open Studio users already have a commercial data integration solution in place. Users may migrate toward Talend Open Studio while running a proprietary solution. The open-source product would be an option for those running solutions such as Microsoft Integration Server and Informatica PowerCenter, de Montcheuil explained.

New features in Talend Open Studio 2.0 include Java language generation. It's an addition to the product's existing support for Perl and SQL.

Talend Open Studio 2.0 also supports both traditional ETL (extract, transform and load) operations as well as ELT (extract, load and transform). In contrast, solutions from Informatica and Oracle use either ETL or ELT. Users of those proprietary systems don't have a choice on which architecture to use, de Montcheuil said.

The difference between the two data-handling methods (ETL and ELT) has to do with performance. For instance, an ELT architecture loads the data on a target server and then processes it. ELT is best used when the objective is to process massive amounts of data, de Montcheuil explained.

Talend Open Studio 2.0 can be downloaded here at no cost.