2011, the Year that Kept on Giving: Application Integration

[admin]

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.

Scott Devens is the General Manager of Talend’s Application Integration Division. His primary job, in 2011, has been to grow the new Application Integration business while ensuring coordination and integration with all other functions and groups of Talend.

Q: Scott, can you summarize 2011 for Talend’s Application Integration business?

Scott: 2011 was the first full year following Talend’s acquisition of Sopera. Together with our colleagues in all groups, we have worked hard to grow this new business, and the results have been rewarding. For example, we more than doubled the run-rate of the business compared to when Sopera was a standalone company. We also built a team of over 80 people dedicated to the Application Integration products and business.

A sure sign of this success is that over the course of the year, we have successfully closed large ESB deals in all 3 major regions where Talend does business (North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific), proving the strong synergies with existing Talend’s solutions.* Recent customer win announcements such as IER or BF&M are only the first ones of a long series!

I would also like to mention the fact that Gartner named us a Cool Vendor in Application and Integration Platforms, a first recognition of the power of combining data and application integration.

Q: Which progress was made on the technology front?

Scott: Just 6 months after the Sopera acquisition, we released Talend ESB, the first Talend-branded ESB. It relies of course on Sopera’s technology and expertise but is also deeply integrated into the Talend Unified Platform technology. I wonder how many vendors succeed in integrating acquired technologies in such a short time frame (I mean really integrating, not just changing the name and pricing).

Key to this fast development is our strong team of Apache committers and contributors, showing our strategic leadership in key Apache projects. Publicly-available statistics actually show that our team members have made more commits to these projects than any other vendor team, including companies who have been working on these projects for a lot longer than we have (and who seem to have problems with basic arithmetic).

Of course, the release of Talend v5 in November was the latest milestone in this integration, with all Talend products now being part of a single, holistic integration solution.

Q: What are the next steps?

Scott: Talend has really changed over the past year and is now truly a multi-product company with a global go-to-market strategy. Several functions such as R&D, finance or marketing have already been brought together, and we are in the process of completing this integration process. I am proud to see that the Application Integration business has become part of Talend’s mainstream trade. With the first holistic integration solution on the market, Talend is well armed to compete in the broad integration market!






More from the Talend blog ...