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Microsoft Supports Open Source Tool
Microsoft and Talend partner up to bring Open Studio, Talend’s open source BI tool, to the Windows platform.
Microsoft is working with data-integration vendor Talend Inc. to optimize that company's flagship Open Studio tool on the Windows platform.
Talend is a Los Altos, Calif.-based provider of open source solutions for migration and integration between operational systems. Open Studio is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool for business intelligence and data warehousing. Open Studio has been downloaded more than 150,000 times since it was released in October 2006, according to Yves de Montcheuil, Talend's vice president of worldwide marketing.
Open Studio is a free, open source product, for which Talend sells support via its Integration Suite subscription service. The suite also comes with additional features designed to facilitate the work of large teams and industrialize enterprise-scale deployments. Talend's On Demand product consolidates Talend Open Studio metadata and project information in an online, shared repository hosted by the company.
"Our mission is to make applications and information systems interoperate and exchange information," de Montcheuil says. "Of course, no information system is pure open source or pure proprietary. That means that we have to work with both."
"Data integration" is about moving and combining data across information systems. The process typically involves extracting data from a source-usually a database, but the source could be files, applications, Web Services or even e-mails-transforming it with joins, lookups and/or calculations, and then loading the transformed data to target systems.
Open Studio ships with about 200 connectors, for a broad variety of sources and targets in the information system, de Montcheuil says. The company's products already include support for widely used Microsoft applications. The collaboration with Microsoft will enable Talend customers to leverage their existing Windows infrastructures to deploy Open Studio.
The collaboration also underscores Microsoft's continuing, albeit uneasy, relationship with open source.
"Over 50 percent of open source applications deployed in the enterprise are running on Windows systems," Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy, says in a statement.
About the Author
John K. Waters is the editor in chief of a number of Converge360.com sites, with a focus on high-end development, AI and future tech. He's been writing about cutting-edge technologies and culture of Silicon Valley for more than two decades, and he's written more than a dozen books. He also co-scripted the documentary film Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which aired on PBS. He can be reached at [email protected].