Talend, supplier of open source data integration, announced today that it is buying a proprietary master data management company's assets and converting them into open source code.

It is the first appearance of open source code in the field of master data management, said Talend CEO Bertrand Diard in an interview. Master data is core or reference data that comes from a known source and may be shared across multiple operations and used to calculate other data. It's sometimes referred to as "one version of the truth." Master data must be managed to ensure its ongoing consistency across many uses.

Microsoft's acquisition of Stratature in 2007 was a move into master data management. In 2005, IBM bought MDM vendor DWL for an undisclosed amount and Ascential for $1.1 billion, followed this past May by the acquisition of privately held Exeros. Other firms in the field include Oracle, HP, SnapLogic, and Informatica. Siperian is deployed on Salesforce.com as a master data manager for customers' data across its applications.

Talend is getting into master data management by acquiring the rights to Amalto, a privately held company that produces B2Box, a data system for business to business exchanges, and B2een, for secure data transfers within public or private communities. Talend will continue development of Amalto products and release them as open source code. "There are not very many examples of proprietary code being acquired to become open source. We want to democratize data integration," Diard said.

Talend's core integration suite is an open source system available for free download; enhanced versions are sold as commercial products.

"Nine months ago, Talend decided to get into the field of master data management. Amalto's technology was fully compatible with our stack. It was a very comfortable fit," said Diard.

Talend produces the Talend Integration Suite, Talend Open Studio 3.1, and Talend Integration Suite RTx for real time data assimilation. It started as an open source project in 2002, with a company formed to support it in 2005. Talend was founded by Fabrice Bonan an Diard. It currently has 150 employees, about half of them developers.

Diard sees the need for data integration and master data management growing with cloud computing. Talend already offers Talend Cloud Data Integration for moving enterprise data into the cloud.

"At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where the application generating data resides," said Yves de Montcheuil, VP of market strategy. The need for data integration is the same, whether in the enterprise or in the cloud.

Jitterbit and Pentaho are Talend open source competitors in the field of data integration.

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