Microsoft and Talend

Last week, we officialised an 8 months partnership with Talend, a french Open Source ISV, editing an ETL called Talend Open Studio. (Backed by AGF Private Equity & Galileo Partners).

Talend is both a competitor and a partner for Microsoft: more than 70% of their users base runs on Windows and we have a competitive offer called SSIS.

We announced that Talend and Microsoft would work on improving TOS’s performances on Microsoft platforms such as Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Dynamics. We have hundreds of clients in common, and we want to propose them the best experience.

Talend also announced that they would have a large booth at the next MS TECHDAYS in Paris. They’ll soon become a certified Microsoft ISV Partner, like SugarCRM ou MYSQL did in the past.

This is a premiere since Talend is the very first french company to engage with the Micrososft Open Souce Lab in redmond, the second in Europe after MYSQL, and we, at MS France, are extremely proud about that.

Some journalists were VERY surprised about this partnership and we had to explain many times why we decided to engage with an “Open Source ISV” .

The fact is that we really don’t care about Talend’s business model. They develop and sell software that runs on windows, everywhere in the world, and they’re gaining in popularity. (150 000 downloads so far).

Our interest is to maximize the experience on our platforms,and this partnership is driven by two things: customer satisfaction and Interoperability.

As opposed to most of the french Open Source players, Talend is an ISV, selling software, hiring good developers with the ambition to become a global player. They belong to what I’d call the french Open Source 2.0 community, focused on business and not on religion issues. They don’t sell 150$/day consultants or low-cost trainings on Open Office, but high-value solutions.  I don’t see more than 5 french open source ISV in that case in France and this may explain why they are getting traction in the US. Pragmatism.

I guess this is what the french software  industry needs now, the french open source software community is polluted by services company or Micro-ISVs, and it really needs credibility.