Talend’s Bertrand Diard
French open source data integration and quality player Talend is actively looking for further acquisitions following its buyout of German enterprise service bus firm Sopera yesterday, CBR has learned.
Talend also announced yesterday that it has raised a $34m war chest from VC fund Silver Lake Sumeru, and Talend co-founder and CEO Bertrand Diard confirmed that it has money left over after the Sopera acquisition burning a hole in its pocket: "As well as back our growth behind the acquisition [the $34m] will also give us enough fuel to look at other [acquisition] opportunities on the market," he told us.
While Diard declined to name any vendors on the firm’s watch list for obvious reasons, he gave a clear indication of the areas the firm is keen to acquire in. "Our focus is on middleware for sure," he said. "We will focus on data integration, quality and management but not as a vertical. We’ll look at business rules, BPM [business process management], CEP [complex event processing]."
Of course many of the independent CEP vendors have been acquired already. StreamBase is still independent, but perhaps even more interesting to Talend could be EsperTech, a small firm with some open source CEP technology as well as commercial offerings for enterprise users. Also potentially of interest could be Atomic Labs and its open source Pion Core CEP.
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Open source BPM also comes from a variety of sources, including Intalio, ProcessMaker and BonitaSoft.
But Diard said that the firm is not only looking at open source options: it would consider buying commercial technology and open sourcing it. He also noted that Talend’s new backers, Silver Lake Sumeru, is one of the largest tech VCs with over $15bn under management. "They have the deepest pockets," he said, hinting that the VC may be tempted to stump up more cash if Talend makes a good case for acquisitions that will complement its portfolio.
The acquisition of Sopera yesterday added 60 staff to Talend’s 270, which Talend said should put it in the top five open source vendors.
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