Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend
French open source data integration and quality player Talend has announced the acquisition of German open source enterprise service bus (ESB) vendor Sopera, on undisclosed terms. Talend simultaneously announced it has raised $34m funding from Silver Lake Sumeru.
The acquisition will add 60 staff to Talend’s 270, which Talend said should put it in the top five open source vendors.
Speaking to CBR ahead of the announcement, Talend co-founder and CEO Bertrand Diard said: "Without the acquisition of Sopera we would not have needed the financing. But as well as back our growth behind the acquisition it will also give us enough fuel to look at other [acquisition] opportunities on the market."
Diard said that Silver Lake Sumeru was reassured by the fact that Talend acquired a master data management (MDM) technology last year from Amalto Technologies: MDM is now a "significant part" of Talend’s total revenue. Indeed Talend claims it is the only data integration player that also has data quality and MDM tools.
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The acquisition of Sopera will complement Talend’s existing portfolio, Diard said. While a detailed roadmap for integration will be announced in December, Diard gave a flavour of what integration will mean: "Sopera offers an ESB, and we already have a number of joint customers using Talend and Sopera together. Data quality is a great addition to a bus, because it means that even if you have data quality issues, they can’t be propagated around different services and applications because our technology will catch them at the middleware layer."
"Data quality is a major problem in data integration projects and we are going to provide data quality in the bus itself," Diard said.
He also explained that while currently users of the Sopera ESB must do manual Java coding in order to integrate other systems, Talend’s data integration adapters – it has 450 – will enable the bus to integrate with more systems more quickly and with less manual intervention.
Diard also claimed that integration between Talend and Sopera will be a boon for companies looking at cloud computing. "You can run Talend in the cloud today, and what companies need is good interoperability between the cloud and on-premise," Diard said. "We will enable them to connect, transform, and run services on the bus in the cloud. Or if they have half on-premise and half in the cloud they will be able to use the repository of the bus to manage the different protocols, security and so on in an abstract layer."
Previously, for customers using Talend who have sought an ESB Talend offered integration with ActiveMQ, Service Mix and Camel. Diard said the firm would continue to support customers using those but added that, "obviously we hope customers will look at what Sopera can do for them."
Diard claimed Talend is doubling revenue every year and could choose to be profitable, but instead is investing for growth.
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