Democratizing the ESB Market

Whenever I talk with a company on a mission, my Spidey Sense starts tingling (or maybe that's just my iPhone on vibrate). But here's the thing about Talend's quest to "democratize the ESB market:" It may be a marketing slogan, but it's one that clarifies, and that's depressingly rare.

"What we mean by democratization," said Pat Walsh, VP of marketing in Talend's new Application Integration Division, "is not only the attractive economics that open source products provide to our customers, but it's also about accessibility to users. Oftentimes these types of products can be complex and difficult to use, and we -- along with the open source community -- are making them easier to use."

The Los Altos, Calif.-based company has earned a reputation as a provider of affordable data management products for the little guy, thanks largely to its open source approach. This week the company added to that reputation with the launch of a production-ready version of the open source Apache Camel project. The new Talend Integration Factory uses Camel patterns to make message-based system integration easier to implement and more scalable.

Apache Camel is the open source, Java-based integration framework based on the patterns identified in Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003), written by Google software engineer Gregor Hohpe and IBM IT specialist Bobby Woolf. (A must read.)

"Camel takes the concept and provides a vocabulary for application integration developers," Walsh told me, "so that they can take what are fairly complex implementations of integration and have a common language and set of templates that allow them to be more productive as they use tools and build out their integration solutions and projects. We've incorporated that into the Talend Integration Factory."

This is the second in a set of product releases stemming from the company's acquisition last year of Sopera, a spin-off from Deutsche Post that developed software and solutions for the SOA/ESB market, also from open source. The first was the Talend Service Factory, a repackaged distribution of Apache CXF, launched in December 2010.

A list of product features is available on the company's website, but a few are worth underscoring:

• This release comes pre-configured in a single installable package, ready to deploy in such environments as OSGi, Apache Tomcat, JEE servers and standalone JVM.
• Its component-based architecture supports a broad set of protocols (http, https, ftp, xmpp rss, and more), data formats (EDI, JSON, CSV, HL7), and languages (JS, Python, Scala).
• And my favorite: It comes with documented examples "based on real-world experience implementing integration solutions."

The Talend Integration Factory is available now. The Community Edition is available under the Apache Public License v2 can be downloaded for freesies here. It's also integrated with Talend’s Data Integration products.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Posted by John K. Waters on February 16, 2011