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February 9, 2008
Three conferences in a row
These past days have sure been busy.
Last week, Talend exhibited at Solutions Linux in Paris, along with 8 other members of the Open Solutions Alliance. This was a great event for us: we announced the launch of the European Chapter of the OSA, the Attali commission had just published its report with the now (in)famous Proposition 58 that calls for more competition between open source and proprietary, we had just announced a partnership with Microsoft - many reasons to get visibility, which we did. See my post on Talend's corporate blog for some examples. The show was typically French - lots of business buyers, and also lots of people who were here to argue about the merits of the freedom of source code!
I was also honored to present in the "Open Source for the Enteprise" track, with a standing room only crowd - data integration is obviously a hot topic.
This week, I was at SugarCon in San Jose - a completely different experience for sure. SugarCRM has dubbed themselves "the commercial open source company" and they have done a great job at achieving this. In attendance were a mix of business users and IT folks, coming to learn about the latest and greatest on SugarCRM and to discover complementary solutions from partners. We did get lots of interest from users, and also from Sugar's own PS guys, who are migrating data a lot. The conference tracks themselves were excellent, lots of high profile keynote speakers including Jonathan Schwartz, Fake Steve Jobs, Larry Augustine, etc. See this post for more details on the sessions.
At SugarCon I delivered a session on data integration, and was happy of the attention it got: many people came to our booth after the fact to learn more. Even Sugar's CEO, John Roberts, was in the room!
And to close the series, I am spending the weekend in sunny Southern California (I think it's sunny, can't see from the ballroom...) at SCALE 6x - the South Cal Linux Expo. Very different crowd: a lot of techies and geeks, but not only them, plus some kids (well, it's on a weekend so parents bring their kids along...). Mostly, these people are here to talk bits and bytes (also to collect stamps for the raffle, and find the latest cool goodies). We got some very good contacts. Unlike the French conference, people are not so interested in the religious aspect of open source, community developers and commercial companies coexist well here. It's refreshing. After all, we each need the others: the open source model couldn't exist without the communities who got everything started and provide the best innovation, commercial companies are a must have for enterprise adoption and fuel continued innovation.
I'll be back home on Wednesday (if AA does not play tricks on me this time...). While I travel, Talend will be exhibiting at Tech Days in Paris - the Microsoft conference. I'll personally skip this one, but I have a great marketing team that takes care of everything :-) Another completely different concept here - open source vendors at a Microsoft conference, who would have dreamed of this a few years ago? Well, data integration is the engine of interoperability, after all.
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at February 9, 2008 5:45 PM
