artima - Open-Source System Integration

Open-Source System Integration

An Interview with Talend's Bertrand Diard and Yves de Montcheuil

by Frank Sommers and Bill Venners

June 8, 2007

Summary

System integration often conjures up the tedium of having to work with the quirks of legacy systems. To shake up the stodgy world of system integration, a new French company, Talend, is applying an open-source approach to producing a high-quality, free, system integration tool.

The need to make disparate systems work together is fundamental to enterprises, yet system integration is not generally thought of as an exciting area of software development. That may be because working with legacy systems—with their idiosyncrasies and bugs—often relegate developers to working with technologies of the past.

Software vendors, and even standards bodies, started to recently discover that applying new approaches and recent innovations to system integration can yield significant benefits, however. One such company is Talend, a French software vendor that has been building an open-source community around its system integration product, Talend Open Studio.

In an interview with Artima, Talend's VP of Marketing Yves de Montcheuil, and co-founder and CEO Bertrand Diard, explain why an open-source approach to system integration is refreshing. For example, they note that without high-quality tools, system integration is a piecemeal job, and that proprietary integration tool vendors charge hefty fees for their wares. Open-source, by contrast, creates both a community of developers that work with certain legacy systems, and also results in a high-quality, free tool.

VP of Marketing Yves de Montcheuil, and co-founder and CEO Bertrand Diard, both with Talend, talk about open-source system integration. (6 minutes 15 seconds)

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About the authors

Frank Sommers is Editor-in-Chief of Artima Developer. He also serves as chief editor of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing's newsletter, and is an elected member of the Jini Community's Technical Advisory Committee. Prior to joining Artima, Frank wrote the Jiniology and Web services columns for JavaWorld.

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc. He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Bill has been active in the Jini Community since its inception. He led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill also serves as an elected member of the Jini Community's initial Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), and in this role helped to define the governance process for the community.