2011, the Year that Kept on Giving: R&D

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This past year has been a game changing year for Talend. In this series of short interviews with key Talend managers, we take a look at several key functions at Talend and try to understand which role they have played in Talend’s success in 2011.

As Talend’s Chief Technical Officer, Cédric Carbone is in charge of the entire R&D organization.

Q: Cédric, what has changed in Talend‘s R&D organization in 2011?

Cédric: The biggest change is that we integrated the ESB development teams within the global R&D organization – not only the former Sopera engineers, but also a large number of new hires who joined us to accelerate the development of ESB technologies and their integration within the Talend Unified Platform. The key benefit of this global, integrated R&D team is our ability to easily leverage and reuse components across the different parts of the platform, and to produce a truly unified integration platform. Key features such as the Studio, the Administration Center, the Runtime, and more, are common to all products.

Q: Have you adopted new tools or methodologies?

Cédric: We retooled significantly our development environment last year, to make it more scalable and more contribution-friendly. On the development side, the team deployed JIRA as our central development and bug tracking tool. The global documentation team migrated to DocBook, a semantic language that enables us to create content in a presentation-neutral form and gives tremendous flexibility for publication in the formats our users need.

Q: How large is the R&D team now?

Cédric: We have grown the global R&D organization to approximately 150 people. More than half of them are located in our Beijing, China development center, but we also have sizable teams of developers and architects in Europe (France & Germany primarily) and in the US. *In total, our engineers work in 7 countries and 6 time zones. This creates unique coordination challenges, but also brings many benefits in terms of cultural diversity, proximity with the community, and time coverage (there are very few time slots when we don’t have engineers online).

Q: Is Talend still active in Apache projects?

Cédric: More than ever! This is an area where we have grown a lot last year. Today, Talend is involved in 16 Apache projects – 11 more than one year ago! We work very closely with the Apache community, via Apache Committers and Project Chairs who are part of the Talend teams. Today, 8 of our colleagues are recognized by the Apache Software Foundation, and we are helping more developers hone their skills to become active participants into these projects.




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