Of course this is a great recognition for us and the efforts we have put into becoming the leader in open source data integration. But the work is far from being over: we now need to win this award!

So, if you are reading this, please take the 30 seconds it will take you to case a vote. The process is simple:
- Visit this URL: http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/?group_id=181308.
- You will need to authenticate into your SourceForge.net account (if you are not a member already, you will be prompted to create an account - it's a very straightforward process and of course it's free).
- Then pick Talend Open Studio as your vote for the category "Most Likely to be the Next $1 billion Acquisition".
- You may pick other winners for other categories if you wish, but this is optional - you can just pick "I do not wish to vote" (yeah, this is a bit of a pain... but it's worth it!)

Don't wait - voting is only open for a few weeks.

And thanks for helping!

In order to compensate for this decrease in initial purchases, SAP is rising maintenance prices. I guess they did the math: less clients x higher cost = constant revenue.

At the same time, Oracle announces both a price hike, as described by Gavin Clarke in The Register, and record quarterly results - the latter making sense given their acquisition spree of the past 3 years and all the cost (and talent) cutting they did in acquired companies.

But where is the logic in all this? As Bertrand said in this post, there probably isn't any - except that customers are locked in! Pretty much like Air France 20 years ago, which was in a situation of monopoly on the French domestic market and could dictate their prices, until low cost airlines such as Easyjet or Ryanair and the TGV came along. Check Air France's promotional costs today - at least for the destinations where they have competitors: they are pretty compelling. But it took Air France quite some time to adjust, and a few years ago they were not in such a good shape. The same holds true in the US, look at AA, UA, or DL and how they reacted to JetBlue or SouthWest. Or how they managed to crush the new low-cost, all-business-class airlines flying from London to NY, but this is another story...

So are SAP and Oracle the legacy airlines of software? And in this case, are open source vendors the low cost carriers? And will legacy vendors adjust some day, or get crushed by open source? Or will they crush open source? I don't think either model will drive the other one out of business. A balance will establish itself. But the more proprietary vendors try to squeeze the last cent out of their clients, the more this balance will tip toward open source.

So, Herr Kagermann, here is a suggestion for you. Start to charge your US customers in Euros, you revenue will jump by 60% overnight. Why? Because you can!
And Larry, one for you too. Index the cost of your software on the price of the oil barrel. Who's going complain? You have them by the balls!
And as an open source vendor, I won't complain either, you can rest assured.

They had to split it into 2 parts:

I first got to discover the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras' (a proof that I don't go to London as often as I used to, since the terminal has been open for 6 months now I believe) and I have to say it's nicely done. Plus, Lille-London in 80 minutes is just great.

Interesting summit, well organized, with fantastic networking opportunities. Lots of high profile VCs, senior IT management from large European firms, and vendors representatives like me. Content wise, virtualization, security, and a few other topics.

The most interesting part of the event was the ability to network with other attendees and with the analysts. I got some quality time with Raven Zachary and Matt Aslett - both key people for Talend to cultivate.

Of course their Boston summit in the Fall is bigger, with 2 days of sessions, parallel tracks, and dedicated open source sessions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out!

- your company is mentioned as a competitor whenever they talk about the 500-pound gorilla

- your direct competitors aren't even listed in the same article

- other products in similar categories play catchup with yours by adding connectors and partnerships they should have had in the first place

- your CEO and co-founder is invited to debate with the Prime Minister of your country (and "your country" is one the majority of people know where it is on the map) - yes, I am planning to get more mileage out of this one ;-)

- your VP of marketing (yours truly) gets interviewed/podcasted/videocasted by industry experts wherever he goes - Chicago, Munich, Paris...

- your sales guys are signing one new customer per day

- your product has been downloaded 250,000 times and the above mentioned 500-pound gorilla only has 3,000 customers

Next step: becoming a household name. Which will be proven true when my wife won't have anymore to explain to her friends what the heck "open source data integration" is about, beside flying around the globe and working at crazy hours.

But the matter of the fact is that, last week, Bertrand (Talend's CEO and co-founder) was invited to a round table with Francois Fillon, France's Prime Minister, and his Minister for Digital Economy, Eric Besson (the journalist in the title is Luc Fayard who moderated the panel). Bertrand actually blogged about it on Talend's corporate blog but still, I thought I would add a few comments.

Unfortunately I couldn't attend - which might be as well, given that the room was crowded with journalists, and staffers from the government members. But I watched carefully the videos, and was impressed by the quality of the debate and the involvement of the two Ministers. Clearly, these guys get it and this is a cool example of bi-partisanship (Besson is a Socialist), as I wished there was more in French politics.

But getting it is not enough. Will they be able to do anything? The problems the economy is facing in France are so deeply rooted in the society, its corporatism, its ideology... President Sarkozy's approval ratings are tanking, as he is torn between these who think he is changing too much (the ones who want to preserve their "avantages acquis", and these who think he is not doing enough, and not fast enough.

As one of the panelists expressed it, being an entrepreneur in France is poorly regarded: a capitalist exploiting the working masses. Bertrand raised a good point about French universities (the kingdom of corporatism by excellence) that do not train their students to be entrepreneurs. I liked Bertrand's mention of Sand Hill Road, next to Stanford University, which is lined with VC firms... (for sure he knows the area, that's where he lives... and I am sure he knows many of these VCs professionally as well). When you poll French students, 7 out of 10 want to become government employees, work 35 hours weeks, and retire early. Yikes. Try the same poll at Stanford or Harvard or MIT. Yet, not all the French are like this but the ones who are not have to deal with these who are... when not everyone is rowing on a boat, it's much more difficult to beat the inertia.

I am not an entrepreneur myself - in the sense that I never created a company - and I am not sure I have what it takes. But I have almost always worked in startups and because of this I have worked very closely with several of them: Bertrand and Fabrice of course, Serge Levy (the founder of SDP, which he sold to Sybase in 1996), Anand Sundaram, Ray Wach and Yury Rapoport, the three co-founders of RSW where I worked in Boston for 3 years, Alain Dumas who founded Sunopsis... and I have a lot of respect for them. They were not all perfect, but they all managed to take a technology idea turn it into a great business.

BTW, here are links to the videos of the round table (in French):
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Yes, 45 minutes for a plane-to-train connection at CDG is tight, and I knew it but I tried. It would have worked if:
- we had not had what the flight attendants called "the longest approach ever": we circled CDG to the East, probably going all the way to Strasbourg before turning back to CDG
- we had gotten a contact spot at the terminal, instead of being sent to a remote parking spot (many contact spots were empty)
- the TGV had been late! (but TGVs comply with Murphy's law: they are late only when you are in them and have an important meeting, never when you're running after them)

Of course, AA competes against Air France. And who is Air France's primary stockholder? Try to guess... the same government who owns Aeroports de Paris. No, I am not suggesting ADP is trying hard to annoy clients of foreign airlines... Unless they try to annoy all of their clients (ooups, sorry, the French word is "usagers") to make sure they use other (foreign) airports? Another (strong) possibility. Problem is, LHR is not any better these days. That leaves BRU, that I love.

Oh, whatever. The next TGV is only in 3 hours. And I have my 3G connection. I'll keep busy.

Both were great shows for Talend:

- lots of Java folks at JavaOne (strange, no?) and lots of interest for data integration technologies. Open source is a big thing in the Java community. We had great discussions with many good contacts, and held also some very valuable meetings with press and analysts (expect some coverage soon).

- TDWI in the Windy City was good too. Relatively smaller than other TDWI conferences, but many representatives from high profile companies came by, intrigued by open source and what it had to offer. I also did a videocast with Claudia Imhoff for the B-Eye-Network - can't wait to view it. And of course, met with a lot of old friends, analysts, partners... this is really a terrific ecosystem. And open source is playing a key role in BI now. The evangelization work is starting to pay off.

The Server Side echoed the launch of the project: Sun Microsystems Announces Mural: Open Master Data Management.

It is still too early to judge of the feature set and quality of this project - our flagship product, Talend Open Studio, has been released for over 18 months now and has over 3 years of R&D behind it. But it is clearly a sign that the open source data integration market is maturing and attracts new entrants. I know our technical folks will be monitoring closely the success of this project. And rather than seeing it as a competitor, I much prefer to see it as an ally in our fight against proprietary lock-in and the outrageous license costs our proprietary competitors are charging!

So... welcome to the open source data integration world, Mural!

That made me think. Talend has had a lot of "new media" coverage recently:
- at Solution Linux, Talend's CEO Bertrand was interviewed on video by VNUNet and NetEco did an entrepreneur portrait of him - still as a videocast
- Ron Powell from the Business Intelligence Network interviewed me for a Solutions Spotlight, not long ago
- I did a number of podcasts at various conferences, with Ron, with Claudia Imhoff...
- and a couple others I can't find the links for!

A few years ago, even the fact of putting sound on screencam demos was unrealistic, for bandwidth reasons - and because many people did not have speakers on their PCs!

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.