Talend, Open Core and Community

[admin]

Hi! Recently, I had a fantastic discussion with DJ Walker-Morgan from The H Open Source about Talend, Open Core and Community. DJ asked me a few pretty tough questions about how we manage to balance the needs of our community with those of our business.


I’d like to share an excerpt:

The H: What drives Talend to go for an open core model?

RT: The open core model allows us to bring powerful technology to the communities that need it while ensuring that the company is healthy enough to maintain a competitive product.

There’s a delicate balance, though; the features in our commercial edition are specifically designed to be useful to large companies with complex projects, but more than the community at large might need. In other words, our product strategy is to create commercial demand for our enterprise features, which fulfill specific use cases that are likely to be uninteresting for non-commercial users.

The H: But this brings up an interesting question. One of the advantages of open source, considering the whole life-cycle rather than the acquisition end of it, is a lack of lock-in and the ability for a customer to disengage from a vendor with less penalty. What you describe is a situation where those open source benefits are not available to enterprise customers. How do you address that for those customers who do go the enterprise route?

RT: Our commitment to open source isn’t just a marketing strategy; Talend Open Studio was our first product, and continues to influence everything we do. Because the open core model allows us to earn a premium for specialized features, we’ve been able to grow and expand our company very quickly and, consequently, release large amounts of open source technology in a short amount of time.

The hardest thing about building an open core product is making informed decisions about which features are universal and which apply only in commercial situations. In order for an open core company to be effective, that needs to be a topic of ongoing debate. We spend a lot of time and energy fine-tuning that part of our strategy because we understand that, if we get it wrong, we jeopardize everything we’ve accomplished so far.

DJ has a transcript of the full discussion on his site, The H Online. You can read it here.




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