Open Source Data Integrator Talend Adds SAP Data

Talend, the open source data integration supplier, recently upgraded its Talend Open Studio to include connectivity into SAP applications.

Open Studio 3.0 is the freely downloadable source code produced by the Talend company and its contributors at the TalendForge.org open source project. About a third of the 400 connectors in Open Studio 3.0 are contributed by its community, with the developers at the 80-employee firm producing the rest, according to CEO Bertrand Diard.

Talend was founded in 2002 in Paris and began distributing Open Studio three years ago. After 500,000 downloads, about half its users are in Europe, 40% in North America and the rest in Asia and other locations. Talend has $10 million in venture capital backing and has opened offices in Fountain Valley and Los Altos, Calif.

Open Studio is a system for moving data from one source to a new repository or application. To accomplish a move, Open Studio can generate Java, Perl or SQL code to access data, transform it into a new format if necessary, and load it into its destination database or application.

It can also detect changes to data in a database and then update the data in all applications that depend on it. Although there is other open source integration software, its closest competitor is probably the well established commercial set of adapters and connectors from Informatica, said Diard.

It includes wizards that allow business analysts to model connections in a graphical environment, with the underlying system tapping the appropriate connector and adjusting it for the required mission.

"We have operational data integration moving data in either real time or batch (mode) between applications," said Yves. Montcheuil, VP of marketing.

Open Studio has been given native SAP support so that SAP application data can be extracted, synchronized with a destination application or repository and migrated there. Open Studio can already connect to Oracle, IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server, Sybase or any standard relational database that follows ODBC or JDBC access standards. It also connects to Oracle applications, including PeopleSoft, J. D. Edwards and Siebel Systems, as well as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM applications. Open Studio is available for free download under the GPLv2 license. Talend sells technical support subscriptions for Open Studio and a product built on top of it, Integration Suite. The latter allows a large development team to jointly work on applications using the suite. It also allows applications to scale up to large volumes of users and greater transaction complexity, said Montcheuil. The suite is priced at $5,000 per developer seat.

Talend has acquired 200 paying customers this year, including Yahoo, Virgin Mobile France, Shopping.com, US Cellular, SwissLife, Honda Bank, Eurofins, MyBuys, and the Levolor division of Rubbermaid.