Talend Acquires Open Source Service Bus

Open source data integration vendor Talend on Tuesday announced it has acquired Sopera, a partner that offers support for the Sopera ASF enterprise service bus (ESB).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sopera will become an application integration subsidiary of Talend, and the company said it will retain Sopera's employees. Having worked with Sopera for two years, Talend says integrations already exist between its Talend Integration Suite and the Sopera service bus.

Talend expects the addition of an ESB to facilitate multiple deployment scenarios. Talend's technology will bolster less-capable data transformation and data mapping capabilities within Sopera's ESB, the company says.

Deploying Talend data-dedupe and data-enrichment steps inside the ESB will also enable users to filter erroneous data as part of the application integration process.

With growing demand for real-time data, Sopera's ESB could help Talend customers speed data transport across information system, from source to target.

Sopera ASF is based on Apache CFX Web services infrastructure, Apache ServiceMix routing infrastructure and the Apache Active MQ message queue. Sopera adds features including a registry, rights management, and a monitoring console to make it easier to deploy and run the software. ASF is also the basis of the Eclipse Swordfish SOA runtime project.

The Sopera deal continues Talend's steady push beyond conventional extract, transform and load data integration. Late last year, Talend acquired Amalto, a deal that gave it the beginnings of a master data management (MDM) offering since refined and released as Talend MDM in January.

Talend executives compared the combination of Talend and Sopera to a would-be merger of Informatica and TIBCO. That's a bit of a stretch in terms of both company scale and depth of technologies. Four-year-old Talend has approximately 1,500 paying customers for its enterprise support of the open source Talend Integration Suite. Sopera has approximately 50 customers for its ASF support services.

On the product front, Talend's nine-month-old MDM offering has yet to be proven in the market. And Sopera lacks business process management (BPM) offerings that typically go hand-in-hand with ESBs. Talend says it will work with open-source BPM partners Bonita Soft or Intallio to close this gap.

Despite its comparatively small size and brief tenure in the data integration market, Talend also announced on Tuesday that it has managed to raise a $34 million round of venture capital financing led by Silver Lake Sumeru. That will surely fund plenty of research and development and additional acquisitions in the open source information management arena.

"The Sopera acquisition is very strategic for us, but it's only just the start," said Yves de Montcheuil, Talend's vice president of marketing. "We've become one of the top-five, pure-play open source vendors in the world, and we are not planning to stop here."