Digitization puts the focus back on open source solutions, says Talend

Soma Tah

With a rising volume of data arising from mobile, social, cloud and IoT sources, the demand for real-time data integration solutions is growing worldwide and India is no different. Digital transformation is another interesting phenomenon that has made business prioritize the data-driven insights more than ever before.

India also happens to be a key market that is undergoing digital transformation. Indian CIOs list digital business as their enterprises' top strategic business priority through 2017 more emphatically than their global counterparts, says IT research firm, Gartner.

As organizations ramp up their digital transformation projects, they will start considering new-age solutions open-source technologies, which is going to open more opportunities for the vendors and solution provider who are betting big on open-source technologies. In fact, a study by Black Duck Software reveals that corporate open source use and participation has reached an all-time high, where 59 percent of respondents said that they participated in open source projects to gain a competitive edge over others.

"Entire technology infrastructure stack is being re-invented and all the new solutions that are open source have seen a lot of traction. For us, open source technologies have been extremely successful," said Mike Tuchen, CEO of  Talend, a Cloud and Big Data integrations solution provider, which recently chose to open its office in Bangalore.

"India is a strategic market for us, also for us uniquely, as we are an open source company and we can see great interest in our products. The number of download requests we get from India, shows the move towards open source clearly. In fact, even though we didn’t have any India presence earlier, India is the No. 2 country worldwide in terms of our product download," added he.

The company projects itself as a next generation open source alternative to the incumbent proprietary solutions vendors such as Informatica, Oracle, SAP and IBM. It offers enterprises open source integration solutions that are either free to download and use under GPL or Apache open source licenses or subscription-based.

In India, Talend sees opportunities primarily in the companies that have embarked on their digital transformation journey and moving to the next generation technologies like machine learning and self-service big data.

"Customers face problems as data reside just not on-prem only, but also in different applications, in different databases, in different file formats, and in cloud as well. We help them to get value out of that data by leveraging next generation technologies like real time machine learning and self help. We are seeing a lot of our customers moving to multi and hybrid cloud environment and we can help them migrate to other clouds seamlessly," said Tuchen.

The new facility office puts the company closer to the development teams of many of our largest customers. "India is also a major development location for many of our customers. Thousand of developers are using our product and we see this as an opportunity to connect with them directly," said he.

Besides sales team, the new facility of Talend in Bangalore houses customer success team, and professional services, who will help Talend deepen its collaboration with the large global SI partners who have a significant presence in India and accelerate training of their associates on Talend solutions, which will help them address the customer requirements.

Talend has over 1,500 customers globally who are either medium or large companies. Globally, it counts companies such as GE Healthcare, Siemens and Citi as its customers. In India the focus will be on financial services, telecom, manufacturing, retail and government mainly, said the company.