October 17, 2008
Introduction to Talend
I didn’t spend much time on the show floor at Teradata Partners, but I did connect with Yves de Montcheuil of Talend for a couple of little chats. Highlights of the Talend story include:
- Talend does open source data integration. If you’ve heard of one open source data integration company, it’s probably Talend.
- Specifically, Talend has two main product lines — ETL/ELT and data quality.
- Open source aside, Talend’s main unusual feature is that its transformations are generated rather than interpreted in some kind of engine. I forget what the exact list of possible target languages is.
- In particular, the transformations can be executed in the database engine. This is why Talend claims strong support for ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) along with ETL (Extract/Transform/Load).
- One consequence of not having a run-time engine is that Talend charges for development seats. Frankly, charging for run-times is usually a lot better as a business model than charging for development seats, but Talend seems to have little choice in the matter.
- Talend seems to have considerable community contributions in the form of individual connectors — there’s apparently even iPod integration — but little other community code. Neither part of that seems surprising.
- Talend has the usual dual-edition business model. I forget whether there’s any feature difference between the editions, or whether it’s all support/indemnification/etc.
- Talend is a French company. Most Talend execs seem to be French, although some of them — Yves included — have at various times lived and worked in the US.
- IIRC, Yves said Talend has around 80 employees, and is venture funded.
- Talend has announced partnerships with various database and business intelligence vendors. I don’t know how much these amount to, however. E.g., there was a Teradata partnership announcement this week, but no Teradata folks seemed to be aware of it; indeed, few if any had even heard of Talend. CTO Luke Lonergan of Greenplum does have a high opinion of Talend — but has he ever sent any business their way? I don’t know.
Categories: Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Talend
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5 Responses to “Introduction to Talend”
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Curt, thanks for the detailed post. If I may refresh your memory on some of these points.
– “I forget what the exact list of possible target languages is”: target languages for code generation are Java, Perl, with embedded SQL (native for each DB supported)
– “charging for run-times is usually a lot better as a business model than charging for development seats”: in the sense that you can extract a lot more money from the customers, yes. But this is not the fairest model for clients.
– “I forget whether there’s any feature difference between the editions, or whether it’s all support/indemnification/etc.”: it goes beyond support and indemnification, Talend Integration Suite also offers teamwork and enterprise deployment/monitoring capabilities. But all connectors are included in both the GPL and the subscription version.
And I agree, the Teradata conference was great, and open source ETL attracted lots of people. It now is clearly identified as an enterprise-ready solution.
Yves,
Thanks. I love the blog publishing format for many reasons. One reason is that it allows one to catch up with details like this. 🙂
Great talking with you,
CAM
I thought Talend compete with Pentaho Kettle among other open source projects. They both have a nice user interface but looks like the performance is not on their priority list.
The teamwork module was weak so far so you pay 5K for support with hope to get some help from a live person because the documentation is just introduction.
Definitely not a server based product, and I believe that why pay-per-dev seat make more sense to them
Norman, I wonder where you got that misconception about performance. Talend does not use an integration engine but is a code generator. Try to beat the performance of native code with a proprietary engine!
And I am not going to apologize for charging for technical support – we are a commercial company, and we do charge for value added services and features.
We do not really compete with Kettle, there is enough market share (and unhappy clients of proprietary vendors) out there for two open source products.
[…] chatted yesterday at TDWI with Yves de Montcheuil of Talend, as a follow-up to some chats at Teradata Partners in October. This time around I got more metrics, […]