11 March 2009, 16:31

Talend: open source integration software complements proprietary solutions

A survey completed by Talend shows that many companies are using more open source data integration to compliment their proprietary data integration solutions. The open source data integration specialist surveyed about 1,000 users through its website. Over half of the responses were from the US and another 35 per cent were from Europe.

Approximately one third of participants use a combination of proprietary and open source software. The latter is used mainly when traditional proprietary products could not cope, or were a commercial solution would be prohibitively expensive. In the operational data field - where data from a business application needs to be able to flow, for example from an ERP to a CRM system - free solutions usually play a vital role.

When asked about an ETL Solution (Extract, Transform, Load) for business intelligence purposes and data warehousing, 61.5 per cent of the survey participants said they use open source solutions for their ETL projects. Data loading and data migration are the second and third most popular types of diverse data integration projects.

Apparently users expect the same performance and enterprise features from open source tools that they expect from proprietary applications. According to the survey participants, usability and performance were the most important part of an open source solution. Zero cost or (relatively) low cost solutions and access to the source code ranked low on the overall scale. For business-critical applications, the respondents want guaranteed response times and expect support models similar to level that professional IT service companies can provide. A large majority of the respondents (almost 85 per cent) go to the community first for support, instead of a dedicated service. Two-thirds of that group were also willing to actively participate in the community.

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