Today’s IT news space is abuzz with two major takeover announcements, and I thought I would share my thoughts on them…

First of all, I want to offer my congratulations to Marten Mickos – I really admire his accomplishments and what he made of MySQL.

1. Sun buys MySQL

This is good news, both for open source users and for open source vendors. For users, it means that MySQL will get the funding it needs to accelerate its growth, and take the product to the next step. MySQL is already a very strong product, with access to the vast resources of Sun it will become the killer database. Beware, proprietary database vendors!

For vendors (like Talend), it is one more proof point that open source is legitimate. For a major player like Sun to acquire MySQL, they must believe in the model. They did not spend $1b to play catch up or to fill a gap. They are clearly embarking in open source and are investing into it.

For competitors: MySQL was already a strong technical contender to Oracle and the other database guys, now it is also a serious business competitor. CIOs will no longer be worried about the solidity of the company when they make their choice. And it will be a lot more difficult for Oracle’s sales people to play out the FUD strategy.

As far as we are concerned, Talend will continue to go after the clients of proprietary vendors, starting with Informatica, leveraging the power of the open source model, our partnerships with other open source vendors and proprietary vendors, our key role in the Open Solutions Alliance, etc.

2. Oracle buys BEA

When Larry wants something, he gets it (with the notable exception of JBoss). He just ends up paying a premium – but he has deep pockets. See Siebel, PeopleSoft, now BEA.

Of course, that’s bad news for the users – it means less choice for them, and more dependency on super large vendors. One more thing they’ll have to buy from their Oracle rep.

2007 was a record year in the M&A field. In the data integration/BI space alone, DataMirror and Cognos became part of IBM, Hyperion was acquired by Oracle, Business Objects merged with SAP, persistent rumors about Informatica keep floating around… Let’s see what 2008 has in store for us.

Bertrand

The OSA (Open Solutions Alliance), whose goal is to define and promote solutions, tools, frameworks and best practices for facilitating the deployment and integration of open applications in the enterprise, has just published the findings collected from over 100 attendees at 5 customer forums ran in the US and Europe (you can download the summary report here).

For these attendees, interoperability of open source solutions is the most important need.  This interoperability offers them a way out of the “all Microsoft” approach, especially by leveraging technology standards.

The results from this survey show that interoperability issues faced by SMB range from authentication, data integration and synchronization, user interfaces, portals, portability and content integration.  Large companies are more focused on integrating and orchestrating business processes, managing execution and integrating legacy applications.  Finally, they are all worried about supporting and managing applications from multiple providers.

In parallel, enterprises say they tend to favor open source solutions, because they offer more integration options and more features.  With more and more frequent M&A, open source solutions appear more viable.

Beyond interoperability, user organizations are also concerned by support, security, license management, services and training when it relates to Open Source solutions.

The OSA will leverage these conclusions to reinforce its actions in 2008.  Not only will the consortium continue its important evangelizing mission toward enterprises, but it will also target systems integrators and software vendors to help them to reinforce the interoperability of their offerings.  As a founding member of the OSA, Talend will of course be part of these efforts, but will also work on reinforcing the interoperability of its solutions, by working actively with its partners.  This is how we will be able to grow our installed user base in always more numerous organizations and to make their life always easier.  And this is yet another example of how open source communities meet the needs of their users, thanks to permanent listening and a strategy driven by user satisfaction.

Bertrand

Today I presented a session on Collaborating for Open Source Interoperability at the European Catalyst Conference in Barcelona, Spain. I was actually presenting this as a representative of the Open Solutions Alliance - but wearing a Talend shirt, of course.

The presentation was well received by senior IT managers, but I was surprised to see how little open source awareness the attendees had. The overall content of the conference was not very dense open-source-wise, so it’s good that we had the opportunity to present the OSA message to this crowd.

Actually, the area that elicited the most questions was the IP compliance part. Which tells me that these IT managers had probably heard all the FUD about open source, but not the positive stuff. At least today, they heard a few good things.

Yves

We just announced the launch of operations in Nuremberg, Germany. Opening a new office is always thrilling for a young company like Talend. It shows our commitment to growing business in a new territory - and our expectations that this territory will yield lots of users of our solutions! The Nuremberg office will support the operations of Talend in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland).

Why Germany? Not only is Germany the largest economy in Europe, it is also one of the most active countries as far as Open Source is concerned. Just looking at our number of downloads and registered users, Germany is pretty high on the list. This data point has been corroborated by several people we know in the industry, including our friends at SourceForge (another OSA founding member).

We have also, over the past year, developed an important community of users in Germany. Opening operations to support them seems only fair.

Germany was also the home of a big Open Source player: SUSE Linux, a major Linux distribution, now owned by Novell. Actually, SUSE was born in Nuremberg, which features an important Open Source community with an Open Source Campus.

I am also happy to welcome Martin Lange as Business Development Manager for Germany. Martin. Martin brings over 13 years of expertise in software development, Business Intelligence and business development.

Welcome on board, Martin!

Bertrand

On October 7, 2007, SAP has offered to acquire Business Objects for €4.8 billion ($6.8 billion) in a friendly takeover.

While this news is not really a surprise - rumors regarding an acquisition of Business Objects had been amplifying in the last few weeks - who the acquirer would be was still up in the air. SAP was of course regarded as a strong possibility.

Business Objects was historically focused on selling reporting solutions to large accounts, and this is what made it a successful company. Over the past few years, with large accounts becoming increasingly saturated with BI products, and the market becoming more and more competitive, Business Objects made the decision to shift its focus toward the mid market. This resulted in two important acquisitions: Crystal for reporting and Acta for data integration (the Acta technology became Business Objects Data Integrator - BODI). It is worth noting that despite the Acta acquisition, Business Objects remained primarily a BI company, with over 80% of its business coming from reporting. The Enterprise Information Management (EIM) products - a fancy name for data integration - represented only $160 million (out of a $1.5 billion total revenue), but was growing quickly.

As a result of these efforts, Business Objects was starting to make headways into the mid market and to grow its channel in this segment. The SAP acquisition is going to change all this. Indeed, despite repeated efforts to address the mid market, SAP still is selling almost exclusively to large accounts. All attempts to sell to smaller companies have failed - probably as much for image reasons as for technology reasons. With SAP taking control of Business Objects, all of the recent efforts by the latter to extend in the mid market are highly at risk. The management and organizational structure of SAP are not equipped to work properly with the mid market and the channel.

Conversely, because of the nature of SAP’s market (large enterprises), a majority of SAP customers are also Informatica’s users (SAP and Informatica had a close partner relationship). With the Business Objects acquisition, SAP account managers will now have an incentive to sell BODI. As a result, SAP’s relationship with Informatica will suffer, and over time Informatica will loose its preferred access to SAP’s installed base.

This acquisition is the first large one for SAP. Unlike Oracle, SAP’s management does not have experience in absorbing large companies. Internal politics are already kicking in at Business Objects, with middle management and staff looking for way to preserve their jobs - or to jump ship. Even though SAP pretends Business Objects will continue to operate independently, all it will take is a bad quarter for SAP management to take over (and Business Objects issued a profit warning the same day the takeover was announced). We predict that in the next 6 to 18 months, Business Objects will be fully absorbed by SAP.

In conclusion - the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP is bad news for Business Objects clients - but good news for Talend in several ways:

- It will weaken Business Objects, and especially BODI, in the mid market and channel

- It will weaken Informatica who will see its partnership with SAP loose ground quickly

Furthermore, this acquisition reinforces the position of open source in general, which alleviates the dependency of customers on takeovers, while promoting interoperability between solutions thanks in particular to consortiums such as the OSA.

And the final question is: who will take over Informatica? The hunting season is not over…

Bertrand

I’d like to take the opportunity of a great article that Anthony Gold wrote in the Enterprise Resource Magazine to comment on the role of the Open Solutions Alliance.

This piece, Open Source Solutions: Seek Value Beyond Cost, highlights the advantages of open source solutions – reliability, openness, costs savings – drawing on results from a survey run by Forrester Research for Unisys. Forrester questioned 500 US and European IT decision makers for this survey, which confirms a number of points I have already mentioned in this blog: for CIOs, the freedom to access the source code is more important than potential costs savings, worldwide enterprises are massively adopting open source, and interoperability is a major focus for our technologies.

Anthony, who also maintains a blog, is the vice president and general manager of open source for Unisys. In this quality, he was involved, along with Talend and several open source key players, in the creation of the OSA. The OSA is a non profit organization that promotes the adoption of open source in the enterprise, by improving the interoperability of open source solutions, implementing joint marketing programs, and creating communities that federate users.

One of the goals of the OSA is to define and promote solutions, tools, frameworks and best practices that make it easier to deploy and integrate applications in the enterprise. I would encourage your to visit the OSA web site, where you will find for example case studies from companies deploying open source solutions. The OSA blog contains also a series of posts summarizing the first six months of the consortium, its goals, its achievements, and targets.

Talend is actively involved in several of the OSA projects, including for example the Common Customer View. We also work closely with other open source vendors on solutions interoperability – including JasperSoft, CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, SugarCRM, etc.

Bertrand

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