Laurent-Bennati

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Born in Marseille in the south of France, I have studied electronics in the past. Being a father of a daughter, I find she is curious about everything and I give her a maximum of time. For leisure, I have played electric guitar for more than 20 years and practice kick boxing in a club twice a week.

Thanks to 15 years of experience between electronic hardware conceptions, CRM / Business Intelligence and data warehouse loading in the Parisian region, I create specific tools related to my business needs. I found with Talend an effective and sustainable way to work on a daily basis in the software testing field.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Currently I am working with Java and Talend Open Studio for Data Integration.

How did you get started?
Experienced on proprietary products and competition, I discovered Talend Open Studio for Data Integration in 2007 and quickly tested it on Debian and Windows to get my bearings.
I then discovered the Talend community in 2011, with M. Giuliano's graduate internship in my office. I wanted to share, with his approval, a component that we created.

What motivates you to participate?
My motivation comes from the fact I can obtain, with a simple adaptation or rewriting, a successful outcome. When I first started using Talend, I quickly found out it reduced my workload and helped gain time.

What has been your biggest surprise?
I was amazed to find that exotic features such as read and write of QRcodes, wave files or Bluetooth management were possible with the open design and versatility of Talend.

What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge was my first component: tFileInputOdb.
Open Office was a strategic choice at the executive level at the office, so I found at the time a functional piece of code on a forum that would allow me to use it as a brick. However, this feature wasn't available in Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. So, the creation of Open Office custom components for Talend was the obvious next step!

What has been your most fulfilling project?
All my component projects were fulfilling! But the most innovative one was the tFileInputItem: following my question regarding this topic in the forum, I remained undecided about the use of this product in my business. And I knew that if it was not provided natively, I would have to build it. Which I did! And as this component could today still be improved and isn't used very much, this feature continues to help me in my job.

What will you be working on next?
The improvement of existing components and the integration of new GNU APIs in the next components are items I will be working on in the future.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
Talend offers innovative projects and robust products enabling managers to control their channels of information and business processes. It seems to me that the activities of banks and stock markets, with large data volumes, may be interested in these types of solutions.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
With the initial need, you should define the functionality or use an already-implemented functionality in an external library to guide the behavior of the component to create.
You should also build on the existing source code in the component palette and answers brought by different forums on the subject.

It is important not to worry about being "academic" or not in the answers given, as long as it covers the initial need. The academic side will emerge when referring to "performance" but for a proof of concept it doesn't apply.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I don't think I'm helping the community in a direct manner, but I share with the community my implementations and components I create. That's because I am more than likely not the only one with this kind of need. Talend Open Studio jobs are mainly used in code, previously generated on Eclipse, as a launcher.

Twitter: @lovibrato
Forum username: bennatigiuliano
Profile link: www.talendforge.org/forum/profile.php?id=33887

Aïcha-Ben-Salem

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Aïcha Ben Salem and I have worked 3 years in Talend's R&D department as a Ph.D. Student. My thesis was a partnership between Talend and a Parisian IT laboratory (Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris Nord LIPN). Compared to an academic thesis, my work is based on university as well as professional research.

The subject covered in my thesis aims at assisting the user in its data quality approach. The goal is to better extract, mix, interpret and reuse data. For this, the data must be related to its semantic meaning, data types, constraints and comments.

The first part deals with the semantic schema recognition of a data source. This enables the extraction of data semantics from all the available information, including the data and the metadata. Firstly, it consists of categorizing the data by assigning it to a category and possibly a sub-category, and secondly establishing relations between columns and possibly discovering the semantics of the manipulated data source. These links detected between columns offer a better understanding of the source and the alternatives for correcting data. This approach allows automatic detection of a large number of syntactic and semantic anomalies.

The second part is the data cleansing using the reports on anomalies returned by the first part. It allows corrections to be made within a column itself (data homogenization), between columns (semantic dependencies) and between lines (eliminating duplicates and similar data). Throughout all this process, recommendations and analysis are provided to the user.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Talend projects the most used are Talend Open Studio for Data Quality and Talend Enterprise for Data Quality as well as Talend Data Integration.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I discovered Talend during a presentation given by Sebastiao Correia (Data Quality Product Manager at Talend) at the Data Excellence Paris (DEP) conference.

What motivates you to participate?
The Ph.D topic was compatible with Talend's goals which consisted in "adding semantics to the different Talend tools".

What has been your biggest surprise?
The biggest surprise was the collaborative and innovative spirit existing in all Talend team members I work with.

What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge was to adapt my scientific research to Talend's needs and then make the research findings functional.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The two most fulfilling projects at Talend were:

• - A new deduplication algorithm used in the MDM and DQ tools.
• - The data schema recognition using semantics existing in data that will be used in the data quality tools.

What will you be working on next?
My wish is that all my work will be integrated in the different Talend tools and will be useful for all of Talend's community.
I am also looking forward to sharing my knowledge about data quality and Talend's tools (especially data integration and data quality) with the academic and professional world.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
A key development area would be to assist users and recommend good actions according to the user's data meaning, needs...
If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Share and share your knowledge! With this in mind, we can only go further.

Twitter: @BensalemAicha
Forum username: BensalemAicha
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Alan-Black

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I've been working with data integration tools for over 15 years, usually as part of a data warehousing project, data migration, or integrating with cloud services. I was first introduced to Talend when I was working for a client who had purchased the Enterprise version of Talend and was looking for a consultant with domain knowledge and substantial data integration experience rather than experience in any particular technology.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
In my recent day work, I mostly use Talend Enterprise Data Integration. I also use Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, for other projects that I'm involved with. I also have experience in writing custom components.

How did you get started?
I started reading the TalendForge forum within the first few days of using Talend. This was to mostly understand technical differences between Talend and other data integration products that I have used. I also read some of the blogs from other community members, to get a more in-depth understanding of certain Talend concepts and real-life experiences.

What motivates you to participate?
I'm a casual contributor to the TalendForge forum, mostly contributing to the community through my own blog. I originally started writing about Talend as I find it a valuable technique in gaining an in-depth understanding of a subject. As a freelance consultant, it is also a useful platform for demonstrating a level of knowledge of a product that I am using.

What has been your biggest challenge?
As I'm sure many find, dealing with complex XML can be challenging. From my experience, this has been the case with most ETL tools. Fortunately, Talend allows you to navigate around some of the more difficult issues due to your ability to plug your own Java code where needed. That said, I'm a strong believer in always using the native capability of a product wherever you can, as ad-hoc third-generation language code usually means that you lose traceability, data lineage and impact analysis. Talend does help by allowing you to write your own routines and ultimately, you can write your own components.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
With cloud service becoming more and more prevalent there is a greater demand to build robust integration Jobs that can reliably interface with, often, unreliable web services. This is both challenging and interesting, especially when you need to move large-scale data across the Internet in a timely manner.

What will you be working on next?
I'm currently looking at (and writing about) component design. I find that understanding how to design custom components provides a real insight into the inner workings of Talend and this benefits all aspects of Job design. I have a number of components that I'd like to build, should I find the time.

I have also been using Talend to build some data-generated websites. It has proven very capable of processing some low-quality third party data files and I have even used it to generate static HTML pages.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
As well as pressing ahead with new technology such as big data, it would be nice to see some progress with some of the lesser-developed features such as the Component Designer.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
If you want to contribute, answering questions on the forum is an obvious place to start.

Personally, I would also consider writing about the different techniques as you use them. Writing about a component, for example, as you use it is a great way to learn how it really works and encourages you to explore all of the features, not just the ones you need today. You don't need to be an expert to write something that someone else will find helpful. You can then keep it to yourself or write your own blog.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I mostly contribute through my own blog www.TalendByExample.com. I'm a casual contributor to the TalendForge forum. I mostly write about the features that are available in the Talend Open Studio products.

My blog: www.TalendByExample.com
Twitter: @TalendByExample
Forum username: tal00000
Profile link: www.talendforge.org/forum/profile.php?id=64103
...

Will-Munji

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I've been working in the business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration space for quite a while and for some of that time have worked with a team of really sharp colleagues at our boutique practice, Kindle Consulting. I'm a father of three great kids who inspire me every day. I live in Atlanta and I love to travel (I have family scattered on three continents). Whenever I can, I love to go speed cycling on the Silver Comet Trail (http://www.silvercometga.com/). My entrepreneurial spirit has led me to try my hands at a number of startup projects – one of which actually uses Talend Open Studio to automate some processes!

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I work mostly on Data Integration, Big Data, and Data Quality projects using Talend Enterprise & Talend Open Studio. I'm currently exploring the ESB suite as well, as interest in that area continues to grow with clients switching to a full Talend stack.

How did you get started?
I was working for a utility sector client in 2007 doing analytics on a new operations platform that had recently been installed. The client noticed a problem in their billing process where the system was not generating bills for all customers on particular service routes. Troubleshooting revealed that the interface that loaded meter data from the field into the system occasionally rejected records for a number of reasons. This called for a solution to validate all data loads. Several options were considered – hiring a Java developer to troubleshoot the logic used in the interface or to simply write a validation routine from scratch. Due to the urgency of the problem and the potential cost of a raw development effort, the manager in charge asked for recommendations. Knowing that buying a data integration tool was not a welcome idea, I went looking for solutions online and found Talend and Pentaho. I downloaded both, burned the midnight oil learning the tools, built prototype validation engines using both tools and decided I liked Talend a whole lot better. When I went back the manager with my proposal and I advised him that the solution was not from IBM or Microsoft (the client was a big blue tech shop at the time), he said “I don't care – just fix the problem”. Not long afterwards, the company upgraded to Talend Enterprise to support the majority of their data integration needs.

What motivates you to participate?
My philosophy is that if I don't share what I have, I won't continue to grow or learn. That's what drives me to participate and in doing so, it helps me stay abreast not only with Talend technology but with overall technology trends.

What has been your biggest surprise?
Though I had a feeling that Talend (and the open source tool market) would grow fast, I am surprised by how fast it has grown. In 2008, I recommended Talend to a client that was in the market for a new data integration tool. I got a call from a technology staffing company that the client was using, asking why I recommended Talend and not Informatica or DataStage. They explained they had never heard of Talend and didn't think I was serving the client's best interest by recommending a tool that was relatively new. Needless to say, last year, the same technology staffing company tried hard to get me to lead one of their Talend projects. They'd since become a believer and were now touting Talend.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Development-wise, one challenge (there are many) that comes to mind was creating a job to generate a monster XML file of several hundred nested fields in a tight delivery window. This exercise forced me to understand the intricacies of all the Talend xml generation components and to be creative in working around the infamous 65k java method size limitation when dealing with xml files with lots of fields.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
“Most” means the most – but I have a number of contenders in that category… One of my really early wins with Talend was to provide an easy solution for printing field services in near-real time to a network of printers scattered across a large campus. The service orders were PDFs that would be generated by a BI system. The question was how to reliably trigger jobs for each printer, and only trigger them when there was a need to do so. The client had called in a number of vendors for proposals and was being quoted some scary numbers. Using Talend, I built a job that would check for availability of service orders in a system of record and create file triggers that the BI system would be watching for every 10 seconds. The solution was beautiful and worked for many years (last time I checked, it was still running).

Another was a major project to convert a client's billing system from a monolithic Java application to a flexible and scalable one built using Talend and Oracle PL/SQL.

What will you be working on next?
I'm currently working on some big data projects leveraging Hive, Pig and Talend to perform processing in Hadoop. One of the areas I enjoy working in is predictive analytics. Some years ago, I was tempted to deepen my skills in that area on some [other] leading platforms. However, the more I work in the Talend / Hadoop big data space, the more I'm finding that I have all I need here to build end to end systems, including predictive analytics solutions using platforms like mahout & R around Hadoop.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
On my wish list is tighter integration of Talend with the Hadoop ecosystem. Hadoop is rapidly evolving and I appreciate how challenging it can be stay abreast with it. One way to do this is to address the broadest use cases very well – that will increase comfort level of adopting these platforms.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Someone once wrote “the only stupid question is the one left unasked”. If you're hungry enough to learn, ask away… Someone will respond with a helpful tip – else we have our quarterbacks (Shong & Sabrina) who always step in. Don't be shy either to attempt difficult questions that you think you have a good idea about. You'll kick yourself when someone else posts the same thing you were thinking.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I visit the forum quite frequently and scan questions that have been answered to see if they were resolved. I also suggest solutions for unanswered questions. I also started blogging (http://kindleconsulting.com/blog/categories/listings/talend.html) last year and plan on catching up on a backlog of topics on things that I've solved in the Talend space.

My blog: http://kindleconsulting.com/
Forum username: willm

Francis-Upton

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Francis Upton and I live in Oakland, California. I used to be President and CTO of Oakland Software and then joined the Talend Team as a Senior Architect after Talend acquired my company, a provider of advanced data transformation tooling, in May 2013. On a more personal side, I'm the proud father of 4 kids and am also a musician. I play the tuba in a symphony orchestra and brass quintet, and also in a band that plays New Orleans style brass band music.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
The project I work on the most is the Talend Data Mapper, which I created with Oakland Software. It provides advanced, easy to use and robust data mapping capabilities as well as adds rich mapping support for COBOL, EDI, Java, etc...

When did you first become familiar with our community?
2008 was the year I first became familiar with the community and started following the company! I downloaded Talend Open Studio for Data Integration and found that the product could work with my company's product.

What motivates you to participate?
My involvement with open source first started through my product: that is how I worked on it, as well as the Jenkins EC2 project. The involvement motivated me to participate even more. I wanted to contribute and give back to the community because Jenkins and Eclipse brought me so much!

What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge was creating a project as large as Talend Data Mapper.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
My most fulfilling project has been Talend Data Mapper ever since I created it as well as working with the Eclipse Platform User Interface team.

What will you be working on next?
Next, I will be working on architecture issues on the Talend Unified Platform.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
My wishes in terms of future development for Talend are the ease of use, a reach toward more developers as well as an integration into large businesses.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
My advice to a new contributor could be to write clean code! More specifically, this means a contributor should not copy and paste code.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
The tool used the most on the TalendForge is the bugtracker, where I contribute by helping the community on bugs and features as well as answer to specific requests about Talend Data Mapper.

My blog: http://francisu.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/francisu
Forum username: francisu

Umesh-Rakhe

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am an ETL, business intelligence and data warehouse consultant working with a well-known Indian IT company, based in Pune. Originally, I come from Yavatmal, which is better known as Cotton City. Being an ETL developer, I spend my time on data analysis techniques and like to talk about big data, social data and international politics.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Mostly, I work with Talend Enterprise Data Integration for business needs and Talend Open Studio for Data Integration allows me to experiment.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I became familiar with the Talend community while working with a Recovery Audit Company, one of the top 10 petabyte companies in the world. I was able to work on a Talend Proof of Concept: because the company deals with many types of data, I had to search for help on the Internet. As no answer to my questions could be found, I started to interact on the TalendForge forum.

What motivates you to participate?
I participate on the forum to return the knowledge I have received from it, as well as help new users get started!

What has been your biggest surprise?
My biggest surprise with the product was the support for almost all types of files, databases, APIs, web services and the list goes on and on.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Creating a Talend job automatically was one of the biggest challenges in my job but, thanks to the JobScript feature, I was able to develop solutions to create jobs using the metadata-driven approach. And most important, this solution was developed using Talend itself, so right now it is capable of developing 1000 jobs per hour.

What will you be working on next?
True parallel processing, generic schema load using metadata (Metadata Injection) and the execution engine are items I will be working on next.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
I would like to see Talend become a complete business intelligence suite.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I will be helping with design patterns in Talend. My next project in terms of development is Talend's big data features!

Blog Umesh Rakhe: http://umeshrakhe.wordpress.com/
Blog Beyond ETL: http://beyondetl.blogspot.in/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/UmeshRakhe
Forum username: Umeshrakhe

Oliver-Wulff

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Oliver Wulff, 39 years old and father of two boys. I spend most of my spare time with my family. The rest of my spare time is spent on open source projects.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I mainly work with Apache projects: CXF, Fediz, Karaf, Camel as well as designing and implementing solutions within customer engagements.

How did you get started?
I have been involved with the Apache community for several years. Initially, I was mainly involved as a user of Tomcat and CXF. Then, I became even more involved when my former employer decided to build an open source web services stack. Following this experience, I joined Sopera (a company acquired by Talend) a few years ago, which gave me the opportunity to spend more time contributing to the community.

What motivates you to participate?
I really enjoy seeing my work used in the community. Even more exciting is the contribution of code and ideas of other community members.

What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge is finding the time to look into other interesting projects you would like to work with and contribute.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The subproject Fediz of Apache CXF has been my most fulfilling project! The idea was developed with a customer where an existing proprietary Single Sign On solution needed to be replaced. Instead of developing and maintaining the whole functionality internally, the customer supported the idea to finally contribute it to a community. The customer benefited of contributions from other users, testing in a broader context, etc.

What will you be working on next?
There are still some interesting features missing in the Fediz project which I'd like to work on. The Apache-based Single Sign On project is based on industry standards, without bounding the customer to a single vendor. Besides Fediz, I'm very positive in using Talend ESB with more customers as it's the only distributed ESB which can be centrally managed and is based on open source components.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Start with smaller things like providing support in the mailing lists, improve documentation, contribute unit tests and patches. If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask in the community.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
The main tools I use are Eclipse, Maven and Git, on my Ubuntu system.

Blog: http://owulff.blogspot.com
Forum username: owulff
...

Tugdual-Sarazin

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Tugdual Sarazin and I work, as a Ph.D. student, on a thesis in partnership with Altic and a Parisian IT laboratory (”Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris Nord” – LIPN). Compared to an academic thesis, my work is based on university as well as professional research.

During my research time, I work on the creation of new algorithms for Data Mining applied to Big Data. And while working at Altic, I put these algorithms in place for clients and partners of the company.

The development of this component combines both aspects of my thesis, being aspects of Big Data Mining research and practical issues of a corporate environment.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Depending on the type of project, I use Talend Open Studio for Data Integration or Talend Open Studio for Big Data. Many projects at Altic rely at some point on one of Talend's solutions, whether the company works on a Business Intelligence or data integration task.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I discovered Talend during a data quality course taught by Sebastiao Correia (Data Quality Project Manager at Talend) in my second year of masters at the Paris 13 University.

What motivates you to participate?
At Altic, we think that the Big Data revolution cannot be accomplished without data mining. Data has become too large and too complex to be processed and analyzed without using intelligent algorithms.

Unfortunately Hadoop data mining tools such as Mahout are too difficult to handle and integrate into a BI project. Easier to use algorithms could provide great services to many companies.

When creating this component (https://help.talend.com/display/TalendComponentsReferenceGuide53EN/tMahoutClustering), our goal was primarily to make Mahout more accessible and easier to use, for the data hacker wishing to better understand its data or the expert in machine learning wanting to analyze the behavior of millions of users.

What has been your biggest surprise?
I had never created components for Talend and was pleasantly surprised by the ease of component creation.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Mahout algorithms are developed by many contributors, that don't always have the same logic. One of the biggest challenges during the development of this component was to create a standardized interface between these algorithms.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most representative project I have worked on was the data analysis for a key player in the mobile phone industry. The goal was to define user behavior groups based on their usage of smartphone applications. This project required the use of innovative data mining algorithms on large volumes of data and the communication of results to non-technical individuals.

We have a Hadoop cluster at Altic, which allowed me to run one of my first algorithms to classify the data into homogeneous groups. It definitely provided a better insight and highlighted analysis areas not previously considered. Rather than sorting the large volume of data as we could have done before, we are now working with its extensiveness.

What will you be working on next?
Recently, I have discovered the Spark project developed by the University of Berkeley. Spark is a framework replacing the Hadoop layer processing: it has proven to be very effective for machine learning algorithms. I especially use it for the development of new algorithms for data classification and will surely create a component that integrates these algorithms.

For those interested, a draft of my project is available on Github. My project's name is Spark-clustering: https://github.com/altic-org/spark-clustering.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
Talend could become more Cloud-oriented through a web interface rather than having to use a full size product.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
A piece of advice to give to a new contributor could be: “what is not shared is lost forever”.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
My advice is to always look for a creative solution to a problem! The world of open source and big data is large: a smaller but more suitable solution exists, according to your needs. And even if it does not exist, you will surely learn something while searching.

My blog: http://altic.org/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Altic_Buzz
...

Antoine-Rouaze

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm a senior year student at the Supinfo school in Caen. I have done several internship missions at Zenika, which led me to discover and master the Neo4j NoSQL database. I also participated and contributed to several open source projects such as Archiva and lately a Talend connector based on Neo4j, in production today. I have also been a Java and Oracle trainer for over three years at Supinfo.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I have mainly been working with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. red to a panicked migration where you shut down the old system, rush the migration, and train after the go-live, using Talend with an iterative migration methodology is a pleasure and a breeze.

How did you get started?
The way I got started on the Neo4j project was through Zenika's Technical Director, who gave me this great opportunity to create the connectors.

What motivates you to participate?
My main motivation was to contribute on a very interesting project and also to know that many people expected these connectors.

What has been your biggest surprise?
My biggest surprise was the fact that my connectors have been integrated in the upcoming release and more generally Talend's highly capable team.

What has been your biggest challenge?
The development of the connectors was quite simple; however, the development of the graphical interface connector was slightly more complicated. I think there could maybe be a lack of documentation on this part, but it was very interesting to discover in depth the source code of Talend.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
In my opinion, this project has probably been the most fulfilling. I have discovered and learned a lot of technology that I did not know before.

What will you be working on next?
My next project is a new internship where I will contribute to Archiva.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
I think Talend should continue to develop NoSQL connectors.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Here is my advice to new contributors: read the documentation and do not hesitate on posting on the forums!

Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/antoinerouaze
Forum username: erouan
Profile link: http://www.talendforge.org/forum/profile.php?id=60438

Stony-Grunow

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I run a non-profit called Third Sector IT. We provide Salesforce Consulting and Salesforce Training. Our main focus is helping charities get the most out of discounted licenses from the Salesforce Foundation – a charitable arm of Salesforce.com. The majority of our clients are non-profits themselves, with a mix of social enterprises and corporates as well. I started using Talend over a year ago, and now all of our database consultants use it.

When not working on Salesforce projects, I can be found in the back alleys of London, my adopted city, searching for hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants to fulfill my foodie needs. I’m still looking for the best Croque Monsieur in London, but have yet to find it.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
We primarily use Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. We work with a lot of clients who have legacy databases. The legacy databases might be custom-built Frankenstein-like monsters in Access, while others are off-the shelf SQL databases often mis-sold or effectively abandoned by their vendors, and cost an arm and leg in maintenance contracts. 

Our clients usually need to migrate, but want a pain-free experience. So we run iterative migrations using Talend. We migrate one table (or object, using Salesforce parlance), show them what we’ve done, and check to see if they like it. Then we do another table, and another. Before we know it, we’ve moved their entire database into Salesforce. The time to wipe Salesforce and re-migrate is usually around an hour or less.

Along the way, we identify dirty data, and also train them in Salesforce using their own (near) live data. They continue to work in the old system uninterrupted, until the day we go live. By that point, they have clean data in a system they’re trained on, with all (well, almost all) of the kinks worked out. 

How did you get started?
I did my first data migration project, pulling from an old SQL database to Salesforce, using’s Salesforce’s Data Loader, which works well with single object loading, but less so for multiple object loading. After locking myself in my spare bedroom and doing VLOOKUP in Excel until I wanted to cry, I vowed to never do it this way again. A Salesforce buddy suggested Talend, and I got hooked.

What has been your biggest surprise?
The sheer power of focusing on the procedure of a migration rather than the migration itself, and that making a change and re-running a migration takes just a few minutes.

What has been your biggest challenge?
I didn’t know what inner joins were when I started, nor how to code a single line of Java, or really anything. I was an English Major in college. Granted, a geeky English major who loved playing with computers. But Talend is not for faint of heart liberal arts majors. You have to pay your dues. It took about a week before I figured out how to make Talend work smoothly.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
I’ve had two particularly fulfilling projects with Talend. One has been building a tool to pull Eventbrite attendee data into Salesforce. It’s beautiful and elegant. I’m still proud to this day that it creates Campaign Members, Leads, Contacts and Accounts, and does so all automatically based on just two fields in the Campaign. We run a lot of Salesforce Training workshops, and whenever someone books on our workshops, their data is pulled from Eventbrite and inserted (or matched) in Salesforce.

What will you be working on next?
We’d like to roll out a migration tool to help a group of charities move from a certain expensive legacy database to a Salesforce database where they can use the Salesforce Foundation’s donated / discounted licenses. We figure we can eventually get the migration price, with training and customization, down to less than a single year’s maintenance fee for the old database. It would be great to help the charities save money this way.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
We’re a BYOD office, so people use a mix of Macs and PCs. And sometimes, we use an old Talend migration job as the basis for a new one. It would be nice if we could use Github to handle versioning of our work, and move Talend projects easily between different operating systems.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Don't be shy about sharing. Get it out there. If it's decent, other people will link to it. Jeff Douglass's blog post on Salesforce's bulk data loader isn't going to win a Pulitzer, but it saved me hours and hours of frustration, and for that I'm incredibly grateful. You may never meet the people you help, but someone will be incredibly grateful to you too someday.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I’d like to reverse this answer, and tell how Talend helps the general community – the world community. Without Talend, our consultancy would be stuck using expensive tools like Informatica, or SnapLogic. We help charities, and they simply can’t afford the sky-high licenses of these products. We can migrate a charity at a smaller cost using Talend, and the savings end up with the charity, who can do more good work with this additional cash. While you might not think you’re doing anything altruistic by creating and supporting Talend, indirectly you’re making the world a better place.

My blog: http://thirdsectorit.org/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/thirdsectorit
Forum username: stonyg...

Jonathan-Bowen

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Working for one of the UK’s biggest ecommerce platform vendors, I am an ecommerce and retail systems consultant. I specialize in product strategy, solution architecture and, of course, systems integration. I’ve recently published a beginner’s guide to Talend Open Studio for Data Integration: “Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration”.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Primarily, I work most with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration.

How did you get started?
I started working with Talend’s tools when I was choosing an integration platform for my company. I spent a long time looking at many different integration platforms and settled on Talend Open Studio for Data Integration as I found it to be the most straightforward and flexible. As it was Java-based, it also suited the in-house skills we had.

What motivates you to participate?
I found the resources provided by Talend - user guides, webinars, tutorials and so on - to be really useful, but I also like to learn about technology from books from the tech publishers. I couldn’t find a single book about Talend, which surprised me given the active community and the huge number of times the Studio had been downloaded. I was looking for a side project to work on, so I thought “why not write a beginner’s guide to Talend Open Studio for Data Integration?” Luckily, I found a publisher who was interested in the project too.

I like contributing to the community forums because it is such a great way to learn about Talend. Reading other members’ questions gives me the opportunity to think about how I would resolve a particular problem. Reading members’ answers also gives you a great way to learn new tricks and tips. I’ve posted a few replies myself over the time I have been a community member and now I have finished my book, I hope to contribute some more!

What has been your biggest surprise?
Two things – how useful the community forum is. It is very active and community members are quick to respond to questions from other users. This has been a big help to me when I have been developing integrations. Secondly, I was surprised at how easy Talend Open Studio for Data Integration is to learn. I am not really a developer by trade, so it was a very pleasant surprise that I could build complex integration jobs with relative ease.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Writing my book was probably the biggest challenge as, like lots of tech authors, I have a day job and any writing needed was to be done in my spare time.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The first integration project I undertook using Talend was probably the most fulfilling. It was relatively complex integration between an ecommerce site and a number of different fulfillment systems, taking 3 or 4 months to complete. It was a great project to learn how to develop using Talend and to understand what Talend is capable of.

What will you be working on next?
I’m continuing to look at other tools in the Talend suite to see if we can make use of them too.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
Hard to say right now, as I am far from exhausting all of the functionality available to me! However, I think Talend’s strategy of providing a unified platform to tackle all kinds of integration tasks – from file exchanges to BPM - is fantastic and if the Talend suite continues to grow in this direction, that would be great.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Don’t think that the community and forum is just for users that already know Talend inside out. It really is a great place for beginners to learn (I know from experience!) and as your knowledge grows, you’ll find you will be able to give something back too.

My blog: http://www.learnintegration.com/
Forum username: jonathanbowen

Diethard-Steiner

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a business intelligence consultant living in London, UK. Over the last few years my main focus has been the creation of open source business intelligence solutions. It has been a fascinating experience so far!

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I have been mainly working with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration as well as Talend Open Studio for MDM.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I attended one of the Talend presentations here in London and since then, I have had a growing interest.

What motivates you to participate?
Participating is just my way of saying a big thanks to the developers of Talend Open Studio and my aim to help new users get started easily.

What has been your biggest surprise?
My biggest surprise was that Talend offered a tool for Master Data Management.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Learning how to use Talend Open Studio for MDM was my biggest challenge ;)

What has been your most fulfilling project?
Writing a small book about Talend Open Studio for MDM is my most fulfilling project ;)

What will you be working on next?
As a consultant, I am involved in various projects and I am always eager to keep up with the latest developments in the open source business intelligence scene. Over the next months, my aim is to look more into Talend's ESB offerings.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
Talend has already quite an extensive tool set – the one, which is currently of most interest to me, is the ESB – so that's where I'd like to see further development.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Learning by example is one of the best approaches to bring new methods across to a new audience – try to combine the theory with good practical examples.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most:
I published a small book on Talend Open Studio for MDM, with the aim to get interested new users up to speed with this tool, in a short amount of time.

My blog: http://diethardsteiner.blogspot.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/diethardsteiner
Forum username: diddy

Francesco-Agosti

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Francesco Agosti. I am 41 and have a background in Business Intelligence. I own a consulting company in Italy and Switzerland, where I currently live. I worked as a Business Intelligence Team Head / Business Intelligence Associate Director for two big Pharma companies (global role for one, European responsibility for the other).

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I mainly use Talend Open Studio for Data Integration.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I have a 10+ year experience in Business Intelligence and am constantly looking around for new solutions, new ideas. That's how I got to know Talend and its community.

What motivates you to participate?
I strongly believe in Open Source and this started quite some time ago. It was back in 1999, I think. At that time, I was working mainly with Cognos Impromptu and Powerplay and I was curious about open source. Amongst other products, I was using MySQL, probably a 3.2x beta, and I tried to create some Impromptu reports on it.
It did not work, but –honestly, without much hope- I dropped an email with the description of the issue to the support mailbox at MySQL.

I was immediately requested to send some ODBC logs which I promptly provided. Imagine my surprise when, 3 or 4 days later, I received an email from Monty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius), who basically said something like “Sorry, I was traveling back from the US, so I could not get back to you before. Your query is indeed SQL92 compliant, so we found a bug in MySQL. Here is the source code for the patch. Can you recompile it and tell me if it works?”.
Obviously, it worked! I wonder if at Cognos (now IBM) they know that their query engine works since then on MySQL thanks to that simple email exchange.

About a month later, I was fighting with a Linux server trying to recompile a kernel including some network drivers. I posted a request for help in the kernel.org forum and promptly received some useful answers, one of which from Alan Cox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox), which obviously solved my problem.
Open Source, at that point, looked to me like calling Microsoft for an issue with the operating system and being answered by Bill Gates on the phone (and getting a working solution from him)!

The open source community, since then, is probably my main source for learning. I found so many members willing to help, that I eventually decided to become part of it, with my limited skills.

I like to think myself as a team player and the community is basically my big team. It's stimulating, inspiring and culturally challenging!

What has been your biggest surprise?
A little more than a year ago, I was with a consulting company, covering the role of Senior Business Analyst and Solution Architect in a Business Intelligence project for an international organization.
The customer had a famous (non Talend) ETL suite, which we had to use.
For some reason, the setup took more than a week, and when it was done, we found issues in transferring some tables containing xml fields.

I needed those tables in the ODS, since I had to analyze the content, so I simply copied from my (Linux) laptop the Talend Open Studio for Data Integration folder into a USB stick, plugged it in a windows 7 client in the customer network -without admin privileges- and executed Talend Open Studio for Data Integration from there.
About 30 minutes later, I had the data I needed, having finished the connection, mapping and job execution. It took a few more days to achieve the same goal with the “official” ETL tool.

What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenges are never due to technology, they are often due to the lack of commitment or a common purpose in a team.
Ideally, teams should form spontaneously from people attracted by the same goals.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
Always the next one! In the past, I was in charge of setting up a Business Intelligence CoE and I am proud of the team we created.

What's on your wishlist?
I would like the option to have a more “asynchronous” behavior. The current architecture is smart and “simple” (which is good), but it also adds some constraints.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
Some more Business Intelligence / Data Warehouse specific functionality and maybe a data modeling extension / integration with the repository.
Also, it could be used as a query engine (i.e. for a Business Intelligence frontend suite) if we can improve the output buffer management.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Be curious, experiment and be eager to share. A stronger community is a great opportunity for everybody: the collective knowledge is more than the sum of each single member's knowledge.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
Sometimes, I provide suggestions in the forums if I happen to have answers.
Often I produce and share components on the Talend Exchange. I have also written tutorials (here is the first part of the series of 10: http://www.powerupbi.com/talend/componentCreation_1.html ) about their creation, based on the trials and errors I had to go through to learn myself.

My company: http://www.powerupbi.com
Linkedin: http://ch.linkedin.com/in/fagosti
Forum username: saburo

Lijo-Lawrence

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a software developer from India working in a Multinational Company. I have been working with Talend products for the past 3.5 years.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I have worked with Talend Open Studio and Talend Data Quality the most.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
We got an integration project and the software budget was nil. We started evaluating the open source tools from Pentaho and Talend: we liked Talend Open Studio the first time we used the software because we were Java people and Talend was easier for us to understand and made developing the project simpler. Moreover, the flexibility of the tools helped us in fulfilling all our needs.

While doing my first project with Talend, we were facing lots of problems. I then turned to the community for help and thanks to the members I got lot of my problems solved.

What motivates you to participate?
While checking the answers for issues, I saw lots of questions that could be answered by me: this is when I started participating. Usually, whenever I get some time I check the forums to answer threads.

What has been your biggest surprise?
The number of components given by Talend really surprises me.

What has been your biggest challenge?
We had a project in which we had to read from N number of delimited files (different schema) and insert into common tables. The project had N number of Talend jobs based on source. I developed a database dependent metadata schema which does a dynamic schema read and maps the data to a standard schema automatically, hereby reducing the number of jobs. I even added some dynamic lexical analysis.

What will you be working on next?
Next, I am planning to work on a cache-based Talend project where multiple jobs can read the create object from cache instead of reading the same lookup file again and again.

Where would you like to see Talend grow/develop in the future?
I would like to see Talend become a complete Business Intelligence tool and a data warehousing solution.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
To a new contributor, I would say we have a great community, so take full use of it!

Tell us about how you help the community.
I contribute to the community by helping other members, answering their queries on the forum.

Twitter: @lijolawrance
Forum username: lijolawrance

Olivier-Lamy

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm Olivier Lamy, 38 years old and the proud father of three (Paul, Jeanne and Rose) with a fourth child coming soon! I spend most of my spare time with my children and playing tennis. The rest of my spare time is spent on open source projects and communities I'm involved in, such as:

• Apache Maven, Archiva, Sqoop, Ognl, Tomcat and Commons;
• Mojo and Redback at Codehaus;
• Jenkins project.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Primarily, I work on Apache projects. Due to my tool building background, you will find me working with various teams to improve their build, migrate to Apache Maven and working on the distribution / provisioning mechanism.

How did you get started?
I started participating in open source projects at the end of 2004, while working on a Dependency Injection Container, in a previous company. I chose Plexus (an Apache Avalon fork) which was used in the Apache Maven land, including Maven core, but Apache Continuum too.

What motivates you to participate?
The most interesting part, while participating in open source projects, is to meet a large number of contributors and learn new technologies and working methods. Open source is an exciting world to participate in.

What has been your biggest surprise?
With such a diverse crowd (different languages, time zones, etc...), the biggest surprise has been the way things can finally be done and improved. Regarding Talend's products, I have been impressed by the quality of the UI tooling.
The other surprise has been this new opportunity at Talend: previous spare time projects have become a job. Very exciting!

What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge was leaving a company I worked in during 10 years, as colleagues were almost like family, to join Talend.

My current challenges are:

• Setting-up my new work-at-home life to have the best work and family life possible;
• Improving the build and distribution systems used at Talend.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most fulfilling projects I have worked on are:

• Apache Maven land: it's a large land with different small projects (core, plugins, scm, shared components, etc...);
• Jenkins: an exciting project and incredible community.

What will you be working on next?
My current focus is:

• Improving and adding new features on Apache Archiva;
• Working on a new project proposal, called Kalumet, for the Apache Foundation;
• Continuing the Apache Maven project improvement.

If you could change something about Talend's solutions, what would it be?
A more automated mechanism to upgrade and patch products would be something to consider.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Being part of Apache can take a long time: so be patient, participate on mailing lists and contribute patches. And one day you might be part of the Apache Software Foundation!
Apache really takes care of the community's first approach, so don't try changing everything. And do not forget: Apache projects can be conservative, as some projects are industry standards.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
The main tools to use for community help are communication tools. Favorites include Skype, Colloquy (IRC client) and email readers to answer questions on mailing lists.

Technical tools include Apache Maven (not a big surprise :-), Intellij Idea and my terminal console (yes, I'm a big fan of command line!).

Blog: http://olamy.blogspot.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/olamy

Hadrian-Zbarcea

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Now living in the US with my wife and three children, I grew up in a town in the Carpathians, in the heart of Transylvania. During my over 15-year career, I worked on interesting and large projects. And had the privilege to work with fantastic people from whom I learned a lot. When I am not in front of the keyboard, I have fun playing chess or go. Or learning Tae Kwon Do from my King Tiger masters!

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I'm primarily responsible for Talend Integration Factory, which is a distro based on Apache Camel. Camel is however embedded, used within or in conjunction with other Talend projects: like Talend Service Factory, Talend ESB and data integration tools. So don't be surprised if you see me lurking there.

How did you get started?
I got involved with Open Source a while ago. At the ASF, my first contribution was more than 5 years ago while looking for an integration technology, for a commercial product I was working on. That was one year before Apache Camel came to life. In 2007, I learned about Camel, joined the community and stayed active in the project since. I am currently involved in a few other Apache projects as well, which is very enriching for my professional life.

What motivates you to participate?
Many things! But most importantly, the people are my motivation to participate. The ASF in particular developed over the years great wisdom in growing communities that produce excellent technology. All of it is done by volunteers: fantastic people who bring interesting ideas that are forged and brought to life in a community. I get to work with people who show leadership in all areas: from coders, to technology evangelists, to community developers and even social activists. It's a very intense and rewarding experience.

What has been your biggest surprise?
I don't think there were surprises so far. We had a few brainstorming sessions last year and looked at the major challenges in the integration space. Based on that, we developed a strategy and decided on technologies to invest in. If anything, I am surprised that our bets were spot on and so far we were able to execute with no glitches. Then again, if you think about the team we put together, it's not that big of a surprise.

What has been your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge is finding the time to look into a bunch of other technologies that are interesting and caught my eye.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
It isn't easy to choose, as I worked on a lot of projects: but overall, I think it is Apache Camel.
At Talend, it was the Talend Integration Factory, which is a distribution based on Camel and CXF, including an OSGi/Karaf container as well. We put it together in a relatively short time, based on stable and proven Apache projects. But we also added a few more examples and better documentation. The fulfilling part was to see the team working so well together!

What will you be working on next?
There is a lot of work to be done. By its very nature, integration implies bringing together multiple systems and hence the various groups responsible for these systems. Our focus is to simplify integration and better manage complexity. I think we did a great job in Camel to simplify integration by both using the EIPs as a common language and using convention over configuration. Next step is to use similar ideas to simplify deployment and operations part of our Unified Platform story. I won't say more, but keep an eye on the services and tools in the next releases.

If you could change something about Talend's solutions, what would it be?
If I understand the question correctly, it has 2 aspects. With the products, I think we're doing great. I wouldn't change anything at this point. We do need to integrate them better, but that's happening already. What I think we need to do is better demonstrate how to use at its best our technologies. I find too many users surprised by the easiness of implementing various scenarios with Camel and Talend Integration Factory. We certainly need more examples, demos, webinars and better documentation.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Don't be shy! Contribute your ideas and code as much as you can. Most of the developers in the open source space are genuinely nice and helpful people. You can learn a lot from them. And certainly, we can learn from you too.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I am involved with a few communities and try to help out and learn. At the ASF, I am deeply involved in the Apache Camel community: doing coding, mentoring, most of the releases in the past years and whatever needs to be done. I can be found online on irc, Skype, email or on the TalendForge forums. If you have a question, feel free to ask. I develop mostly on OS X and Linux, using Java, Maven and Eclipse.

Blog: http://camelbot.blogspot.com/
Forum username: hadrian Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/hgz

Daniel-Kulp

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
My full name is John Daniel Kulp, but I've always gone by middle name for some reason, not really sure why. I'm 38, married, have 2 boys (Ryan, 5, and Nathan 3) and 2 Cocker Spaniels. I've lived in Framingham, MA (named the 3rd geekiest community in the US by Forbes!) for 11 years. I grew up in Bucks County, PA and Deltona, FL, but went to college at Northeastern University in Boston and decided to stay in Massachusetts after graduation.

My main passions include the Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots, and Open Source software. I'm a committer on Apache CXF, Camel, Maven, WebServices, Aries, and ServiceMix.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I primarily work on the Apache projects we build upon which include Apache CXF, Apache Camel, Apache WSS4J, Apache Karaf, etc... These projects form the building blocks of Talend Service Factory and Talend Integration Factory and the Talend ESB and I've been heavily involved with those projects as well.

How did you get started?
I've been working on Web Service stacks for close to 10 years now, having been a primary technical lead for 3 very different stacks and contributing to at least 2 others. Roughly 6 years ago, the company I was working for decided to develop a new offering as Open Source and I was selected as part of the team to lead that effort. Since then, I've gotten more involved with several other Open Source projects which have helped to open many doors and opportunities for me. Last year, I joined Sopera to lead their open source Apache based offerings and with Talend acquiring Sopera, I'm now doing the same for Talend.

What motivates you to participate?
I really enjoy seeing my work used in new and exciting ways. With most closed source/company driven projects I've been involved in, the only places the projects have ended up is where the sales and marketing groups pushed it. With Open Source, it's very different with people testing the projects in all kinds of applications and scenarios. This allows new problems to be discovered with new ideas and contributions that go along with them. It's very exciting to see.

What has been your biggest surprise?
The quality of the Apache communities: I'm not sure if participating in Open Source communities makes people better (brings out the best in people) or only the better people participate in Open Source, but I've been extremely surprised by how well the communities work together. I've worked with some amazing people on closed source/company projects, but it really doesn't compare to the community driven projects.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Communication: working on a global team really puts a stress on people's ability to communicate. Timezones get in the way. Different schedules for daylight savings time switch overs. Expectations of “instant” responses. Etc... At my previous job, the team learned how to deal with those issues over time and I really got used to it. When I started at Talend, it was really a shock to me as I had to re-teach the process and expectations to a new audience.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
Without a doubt: Apache CXF. I've been an important part of CXF since its first lines of code were written. I've seen the community around CXF grow from a single company offering to a very diverse group of excellent individuals. I've seen it being adopted left and right by all kinds of companies and products. And I'm very proud of all the work that has gone into making CXF a success.

What will you be working on next?
I've been starting to really dig into Apache Camel more (and was just recently voted in as a committer there). I definitely plan to start enhancing Camel a bit. Right now, I've just been working on trying to get the build times down a bit. :-)

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
Ask questions and start with the small things. Most of the more successful contributors I've worked with didn't start off trying to implement some wiz-bang component or similar. They've started by asking questions, answering questions on the users lists, fixing small bugs, basically finding simple things to get involved in and then move on to bigger things as their knowledge and expertise grows.

Blog: http://www.dankulp.com/blog/
Forum username: dkulp Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/dankulp

Glen-Mazza

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm a software developer with about 15 years experience, primarily working for a contractor on various U.S. government agencies (DOD, ICE, EPA) but also on some commercial accounts in the food industry. Towards the latter part of my contracting career I was able to integrate more and more open source projects into my work, and am now happy to have a position that allows me to work on Open Source full time.

I'm a Western New York State native (Go Bills/Sabres!). In my spare time, I enjoy reading history books, touring historical sites and am a fan of Big Band Era music and swing dancing.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
Talend Service Factory and Talend Integration Factory, blogging tutorials, working on examples, helping coworkers and providing system documentation. Also helping with the Talend ESB documentation.

How did you get started?
In Spring 2007 I took a break from work for several months to study a subject I knew very little about--web services. The dominant open source web service stack at the time appeared to be a mostly closed shop, with most committers being employees of a single company. But the incubating CXF was most welcoming of contributors regardless of company and I was able to contribute there and with Glassfish Metro, another web service stack, all the while blogging about and comparing/contrasting the two products. Over time it brought me great pleasure to see CXF and Metro become the two dominant web service stacks--if I may rely on user list traffic as an indicator--as well as see a general rebirth of SOAP-based web services, which many thought at the time were going to be completely phased out in favor of REST.

What motivates you to participate?
My primary reward is helping my fellow coworkers in their specific specialties--WS-Trust, REST, Karaf, for example. For the user community, I love being able to anticipate people's needs, blogging about it, and efficiently answering people's questions on mailing lists merely by giving a quick link to a blog entry. Some problems/solutions can take hours--or more--to figure out, so when I can simplify the solution for others so it takes them just minutes, great. I think the larger problem with the adoption of SOAP services in the past was a lack of documentation but nowadays most questions on the mailing lists can be answered very rapidly and efficiently, keeping users humming along.

What has been your biggest surprise?
This is the first work-at-home job I've had, and I didn't know how well I could handle the isolation. But it turns you're not really isolated: we have Skype, IRC, and email to link us all together real-time. I also love how, due to the global makeup of Talend, there are always some teammates working no matter what hour of the day you may be working. I love the efficiencies generated by working at home, making the hours I spend more meaningful as a result.

What has been your biggest challenge?
For my blog, switching to videocasts--I've done two so far and have more in the pipeline. Up until now my blog was text-only but now I'm adding audio and video and learning how to properly combine both, as well as trying to provide "live" compelling explanations and descriptions of various technologies. For my research, many third-party solutions that Talend needs to look into from time to time are not particularly well-documented and it can take a lot of effort and trial-and-error testing to figure out how some software packages work.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most rewarding work that I've done at Talend is probably standing up the Talend Service Factory and Talend Integration Factory documentation and playing a role in getting the company on the Docbook standard. For the community in general, maintaining my blog articles on Apache CXF and GlassFish Metro and helping the user community provides the greatest ongoing rewards.

What will you be working on next?
Presently, helping Colm more with his upcoming Security Token Service implementation (providing test cases), researching the Karaf source code more with an eye on adding more contributions, as well as more videos on REST and Karaf.

If you could change something about Talend's solutions, what would it be?
I'd like to see more of Talend's website pages become community-editable, like a Wiki.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
For open source development, actually I'd have to give two: Avoid the drain and distraction of project politics whenever you can--even if opposing solutions you disdain may not be the best, much can be otherwise gained by just concentrating on the technologies and solutions and helping the user community instead. Further, try not to spread yourself too thin by working on too many projects at once. The work on any open-source project consists of overhead and actual work, and overhead is cumulative for each project you take part in, squeezing out that actual work (on any project) that you can do.

Blog: http://www.jroller.com/gmazza/
Forum username: gmazza Twitter: @glenmazza

Colm-O-Heigeartaigh

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I work as a Software Architect in the Application Integration division at Talend, specializing in the area of security. I am an active committer on the Apache Santuario (XML Security), Apache Web Services, and Apache CXF projects. And am also the lead developer on Apache WSS4J. In what seems like another lifetime, I also acquired a PhD in the area of cryptography.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I mainly work on Apache projects such as Apache Santuario, Apache WSS4J and Apache CXF. These products are used as part of TSF, TIF and TESB. I also do some additional work as part of TSF and TESB in the area of security.

How did you get started?
I have been involved with the Apache community for several years. And have been working for Talend since 2010.

What motivates you to participate?
The area of security is a complex one with many pitfalls for users. Providing prompt responses to any queries in this area helps users overcome these hurdles. Getting feedback on new features, or suggested improvements, is also very valuable as it helps to drive future features in the products.

What has been your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge as a security developer is to provide complex functionality but make it easy to use. Most of the Web Services Security specifications are hugely complex. By putting a lot of effort into ease-of-use, we can make this functionality accessible to users who are not security experts.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most fulfilling project I have worked on has been improving the WS-Security support in Apache CXF, mainly via the Apache WSS4J subproject.

What will you be working on next?
I will continue to drive improvements in the security space across a number of different products. And am adding support for the WS-Security Kerberos Token Profile to Apache WSS4J, as well as adding WS-SecurityPolicy support for this feature to Apache CXF. I am also doing extensive work in the area of WS-Trust.

Blog: http://coheigea.blogspot.com/
Forum username: coheigea

Christian-Schneider

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a software architect working for Talend in the Apache Team. I am a committer in the Apache CXF, Apache Camel and Apache Karaf open source projects.
Privately, I am married and a proud father of a 3-year-old daughter.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
The Talend projects I work on the most are Talend Service Factory, Talend Integration Factory and Talend ESB.

How did you get started?
I started at Talend in January 2011 but was involved in the Apache projects since 2007.

What motivates you to participate?
I am very interested in SOA and Integration. And motivated by driving innovation in those fields and being able to help people.

What has been your biggest surprise?
The biggest surprise has been the wealth of components Talend Open Studio supports.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Working with the worldwide teams has been the biggest challenge at Talend.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most fulfilling project has been helping build the SOA at Energy Baden Württemberg, a German energy company.

What will you be working on next?
Next, I'll be working on making Talend's Unified Platform a reality: mostly in regard to provisioning. I am also working on the next major Apache Camel version 3.0.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
New contributors need to know they should start with the small things and ask a lot of questions.

Tell us about how you help the community and which tools you use the most.
I help on the Apache and Talend mailing lists and integrate patches people send.
My main tools are Maven, Eclipse, Skype, mail and IRC.

Blog: http://www.liquid-reality.de/
Forum username: cschneider Twitter: @schneider_chris

Sergey-Beryozkin

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm originally from Belarus and now living in Dublin, Ireland.
I'm an Apache CXF JAX-RS (Java API for RESTful services) implementation project lead, representing Talend at JSR-339 (JAX-RS 2.0) Expert Group.
I also co-wrote Distributed OSGi Reference Implementation (currently Apache CXF subproject) and am the current maintainer of Jettison JSON project at Codehaus.
I am interested in the way web service applications can interoperate, deal with incompatible changes, evolve without affecting the consumers and how they can be secured.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
TSF and looking forward to getting more involved with TESB, TOS and other projects. Particularly, I think there is a lot of space for coming up with innovative solutions to do with exposing arbitrary data and relevant processes via REST.

How did you get started?
I signed in shortly after we had released the first TSF.

What motivates you to participate?
Generally, I enjoy working with users and answering their queries. Users can give us an indication of feature importance; they can help us prioritize our work. At the moment, Apache CXF users are my main audience but I look forward to contributing to the Talend forums too.

What has been your biggest surprise?
The biggest surprise has been the quality of UI tooling across multiple Talend offerings.

What has been your biggest challenge?
My current challenge is to figure out how to get Apache CXF JAX-RS integrated with TESB/TOS/etc effectively.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
The most fulfilling project has been the Apache CXF JAX-RS implementation.

What will you be working on next?

• Next projects include Advanced Security for RESTful endpoints;
• And cooperating with Talend colleagues on having JAX-RS endpoints monitored, located and linked to UI components.

Blog: http://sberyozkin.blogspot.com/
Forum username: sberyozkin

Jean-Baptiste-Onofré

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm Jean-Baptiste Onofré, 32, married, 2 children (Noah and Rose). I've been living in the Paris area for 8 years but I come from the south of France. I love rugby (I played a lot) and music in general.
But my passion and addiction is really open source and Apache projects.
I've been involved in Apache projects for 5 years now. I also worked on Linux kernel before (USB stack) and other projects.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I'm member of the Talend Apache team and a committer on the following Apache projects:

• Apache ServiceMix
• Apache Karaf
• Apache Camel
• Apache ACE

These projects are the foundation of Talend Service Factory, Talend Integration Factory and, of course, Talend ESB.

When did you first become familiar with our community?
I have known Talend for 4 years as we used Talend Open Studio in my previous company. But, there were no direct relationships between Talend DI and my activity on the Apache projects. Last year, Talend bought Sopera and came into the Application Integration world. Talend contacted me to work on the Talend AI basement, powered by the Apache projects.

What motivates you to participate?
My first motivation is simply to be able to work full time on Apache projects. I was looking for this kind of work: it's not easy to work in a formal company during the day and switch to Apache / Open Source projects during the night :)

What has been your biggest surprise?
The biggest surprise has been the Talend organization. I was thinking that - Talend AI being quite new - some processes and teams should have been defined. But it's not the case at all: we have a clear idea of the roadmap and know exactly where we want to go.

What has been your biggest challenge?
A big challenge was to move from my previous company :) I joined 8 years ago to build all the company's software. When I arrived, we were 20, and now the company has 70 employees.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
I think it's Apache Karaf. We started to work on an OSGi container in ServiceMix4. We created ServiceMix Kernel. It was clear that this kernel could be interesting for a large number of projects. We decided to create an independent project, as a sub-project of Apache Felix: Apache Felix Karaf.
Finally, thanks to a huge adoption, we created a top level project one year ago: Apache Karaf.

What will you be working on next?
Now, my focus is:

• Increasing the Karaf usage and release Karaf 3.0.0, a major release;
• Work on the provisioning area. I'm still working on Apache ACE and AutoDeploy (http://buildprocess.sourceforge.net). I would like to create a complete provisioning platform for Talend Unified Platform.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?

Be patient :) It's really great to feel part of a community like Apache, but it takes time. You have to prove your value, by submitting a bunch of patches, documentation and participating on the mailing lists.

Blog: http://blog.nanthrax.net
Twitter: @jbonofre

Carl--Walker-(walkerca)

Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am the President and Principal Engineer of Bekwam Inc., a Maryland (US) consulting firm. I've been a software engineer since 1993 and founded Bekwam in 2007 to specialize in Java-based apps.

Which Talend projects do you work with the most?
I work with Talend Open Studio.

How did you get started?
I started using Talend Open Studio because I found myself writing the same data handling code over and over again on consulting jobs. Talend is helping me break that loop by replacing hand-coded functions with off-the-shelf components. Not only are consulting jobs with Talend successful, but Talend Open Studio leaves the client with code that is easy to maintain in-house.

What motivates you to participate?
I like to participate in the Talend community because the technology is open and accessible. In addition to being able to download Talend Open Studio for productive client engagements, I blog, record training videos, respond to Forum posts, and write components for the Talend Exchange.

What has been your biggest surprise?
I'm surprised at the depth of the Talend product line: Talend Open Studio, Talend Open Profiler, MDM, Talend Service Factory.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Clients assume that picking a tool like Talend Open Studio will force them into a difficult negotiating position with a single vendor when actually Talend Open Studio can be deployed without establishing a contractual relationship.

What has been your most fulfilling project?
A client was testing a web service manually. The testing took hours and involved 3 team members. Moreover, the testing was disruptive to the project and key developers needed to be pulled away from their work with every system change. I automated the testing in a few minutes with Talend Open Studio components including tOracleInput and tFileFetch. The team was grateful to see the tedious task go away. The test could be repeated as needed without affecting the project.

What will you be working on next?
My next Talend project is a Data-as-a-Service project to aggregate, format, and analyze public school financial data.

If you could change something about Talend's solutions, what would it be?
Better scripting support with gentler error handling would make a lot of users happier.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new contributor, what would you say?
My advice to new users is to be inquisitive and to explore all the components and features in Talend Open Studio.

Blog: http://bekwam.blogspot.com
Twitter: @bekwaminc
Forum username: walkerca

John-Garrett-Martin

Hello, my name is John Garrett Martin and I've been working with Talend since 2007 with many different companies.

My experience with Talend began when I was working at a small startup that provides BI for quick service restaurant franchises. We were facing an ugly legacy system built from a dizzyingly complex set of Perl and bash scripts. With the ability to generate code in Java or Perl, Talend fit right into my needs and allowed me to quickly turn out high-quality ETL jobs.  One of the key features for us was that Talend is open-source—allowing us to see the code and integrate the jobs directly into the existing system. We were able to rebuild the existing system piece by piece and in the end we had over 100 jobs in production in under 3 months.

Since then I've seen success after success with Talend. It has proven to be as flexible as it is powerful. I've used Talend as the “glue” between applications—integrating direct calls to application API's and also as complex processing to scrape, match and aggregate log files for interesting data. I've even seen a couple of games implemented as Talend jobs. The ability to modify and create components, add custom code anywhere and the options to run your jobs makes Talend the most flexible ETL tool I've ever used.

I started posting on the Talend forums when I was hired as a Talend expert for a multinational video game company. I use the forums to keep my skills sharp and to stay informed about problems that people commonly face with Talend. If you have a hard problem you're using Talend to solve, the forums are the best place to find expertise.

Kzone

Hi, my name is Laurent Raulier, known as Kzone on the TalendForge forum.

I live in Paris, France and have been using Talend for over 2 years.

My first experience with Talend, in my previous job, was migrating data in an AS400 database.

It was a relatively simple and successful project, due to Talend's capability to manage different formats and databases.

Following this project, we built small but efficient applications (data integration and flow management). And we performed migrations using Talend.

But the most important project with Talend involved student insurance.
This project managed several sources with different formats and provided data quality along the entire process. We had to deal with a lot of issues and synchronize data at different levels.

The creation of applications is simple with Talend. I usually write use cases and “translated” them into Talend jobs. It's one of the reasons Talend is so powerful. What you need is what you get with Talend!

After becoming more and more involved in the Talend community, I have recently joined Talend as an employee! I work as a consultant, bringing my expertise to the team and the clients I visit. If you are also interested in a job at Talend, check the Talend careers page: http://www.talend.com/jobs/jobs-talend.php

Over all, a special thank you to the community!
A thank you to the Talend team!
And we need more new components on the Talend Exchange!

Igor-Krpan

Hello! My name is Igor Krpan. I work with NEXE Grupa d.d. http://www.nexe.hr/ in the controlling sector.

Our company has 15 members in Croatia and another 11 in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Russia.
New member acquisition has lead to the use of several ERP systems which are concurently in use.
The BI system was built at the top of them to assure the unified structure of data and to facilitate generating standard and ad-hoc reports.

Now, the company is in the middle of the Navsion ERP implementation together with the new BI system.

Recently, some jobs have appeared regarding data manipulation and preparation for the new BI system.
I decided to search over the internet for an open source, free and easy to use tool to help me in my work.

And I found Talend! Basic transformations I needed were supported and at first I did not pay much attention to what else it could do.
But, as time went, new requests were arrising and I then discovered the power, flexibility and robustness of Talend Open Studio.

It is a pleasure to learn about components: they are well documented and for each of them you can find at least one use example.

Since Talend helped me and saved me lots of time I decided to give something back and started the translation to Croatian.

With regards,
Igor Krpan, dipl. ing.
http://www.krpan.info/

Joe-Burns

Hello - My name is Joe Burns and I am in the Marketing Operations group for a global automotive OEM. My official title is Marketing Analytics Program Manager and I'm responsible for delivering a variety of key performance metrics for advertising, marketing, and lead management. That also means I'm required to run a solo covert IT shop for marketing, because like many of you we have resource constraints! So finding tools that are easy-to-use with a high-degree of functionality are very important for us.

We were in search of an ETL tool to build a departmental data mart when we discovered Talend. Initially we were not sure that it would satisfy our requirements. But after several weeks of evaluation, we were very pleased with Talend's capabilities. It contained all the functionality we needed "off-the-shelf". It also provided us a way to incorporate custom business logic where necessary. We now have 14 different data source from a variety of external formats that we use in our data mart. This would have been impossible to do without Talend.

While all the above is important, I've also been impressed with the user community. Because of the community's global nature, I don't have to worry about translations or support for internationalization for our global business. I know there's a dedicated community that we can go to for answers and support.

We've also established a local user group for users in the Mid-South region of the United States. It's been a fun project organizing the group, seeing how others are using Talend, and sharing knowledge with others. If you are nearby and would like to join us, search for "Mid South Talend Users Group" on LinkedIn. We meet quarterly and have great support from the Talend staff across a number of levels.

It's been exciting to see the progress of both the tool and the community and I look forward to sharing many more successes with the Talend community.

"Mid South Talend Users" Group on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3256896

Konstantinos-Fardelas

Hi, my name is Konstantinos Fardelas.

I work in the IT and Telecommunications Sector. The last few months I have been collaborating with Telecompare SA, a consulting company in Greece, undertaking important Telecom Audit and Management projects.

During these projects, I had the chance to meet new colleagues who introduced me for the first time to Talend Open Studio. Talend Open Studio is far beyond a simple piece of ETL software. It proved to be a really precious tool, executing consistently crucial business procedures such as data migration and synchronization tasks in less time and effort.

While digging in Talend Open Studio, I had discovered the option for a Greek translation through Talend Babili and I had already made a to-do note, when EL/LAK, a non-profit Greek organization that promotes and develops open source software for education, public and business sector in Greece, announced a sponsored initiative regarding translation of open source software that could be useful in the Greek public sector.

Today, Talend Open Studio User Guide release 3.2 is fully translated in Greek and is publicly available on TalendForge. Future releases of Talend Open Studio will always add some new lines in their User Guides, so the source files are also publicly available in Talend community Wiki for anyone who wants to keep it up to date. In addition, the Talend Open Studio interface is almost fully translated and I hope the Greek language will be available and error-proof in the next Talend Open Studio update.

Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions for future actions regarding Talend Open Studio.

Mohamad-Sibai

Hello, this is Mohamad Sibai, CIO of Softway, a Saudi Arabia-based company focused on Open Source Enterprise Solutions.

As a technical decision maker at Softway, we have spent enough time and effort evaluating suitable open source tools to manage our own and our customer's overall data and application integration, as well as the legacy system migration and the data synchronization with extensibility and scalability options. Of course Talend was the perfect match. It includes data quality options which solved a lot of issues that we were stuck with in some particular projects.

On the other hand, we were very careful to select the handiest solution with a graphical interface in order to make the life of our service integration team easier. Talend is an easy to use solution and has a visual interface for job creation and deployment. The learning cycle is very short, the components library is huge and it is easy to create new components.

No need to mention prompt response we always get from Talend on both sides (Sales and Support). And I have to send my warm regards to the Talend community for their valuable contributions.

As Talend has been added to Gartner's “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” in November 2009, it gave us the satisfaction and confidence we had chosen the right tool.

We think that adding the Arabic language to Talend is challenging, because we are using non-Latin characters with a right to left orientation. However, this is useful as there is a huge movement in the region towards open source enterprise applications and we hope to see more community contributions in this domain.

Benoit-Courtine

Hello, my name is Benoit Courtine and I work for AlcionGroup, as Project Manager for Java IT Projects.

Two years ago, I worked on a small data migration project. I didn't know Talend and commercial ETL's were out of budget, so the project was developed in Java. During this project, I inquired about data migration tools and discovered Talend Open Studio. I was impressed: number of connectors, intuitive product,... After that, I worked on a similar, but more complex project and this time, I chose Talend: this project was developed more than twice as fast, and was much easier to maintain.

I then learned a lot about Talend (taking a Talend Training). I got certified and decided to get involved in the community, developing components (that can be found on Talend Exchange) and participating in a Talend French forum.

Talend has become a real "Swiss Army knife", and can help on various tasks. Since I discovered Talend, I have been using it on all my projects, even those that do not deal with data migration or transformation. My entire company has also been convinced by Talend's efficiency and has become a Talend partner: most of our data projects are done with Talend.

My last advice: try it! You will not regret it!
See you.

Patrice-Soulet

Hello, my name is Patrice Soulet.

I discovered Talend a long time ago, at its beginning even before version 1.
Having over 10 years of experience in ETL, the product seemed to have great potential, even if it had only some features in its first version.

Today, Talend Open Studio has evolved and is more than just an ETL tool.
I work in a consulting firm in the insurance industry that publishes a mathematical calculation software, Calfitec, and I use Talend Open Studio daily, not only to feed the software database, but also to manage backups, automate testing,...
Possibilities are vast and this single tool can replace several other!

Not only is it a quality tool, but it is also simple to manipulate even by non-professionals: I have never learned java. It is to facilitate the use of Talend Open Studio that I participated in the Babili project.

Arnaud-Gavazzi

Hello, my name is Arnaud and I work in a global Industry company. My job is IS project manager for the supply chain, more specifically for BI and ERP needs, based in France.

The project that led us to Talend is a Data Quality project for our data warehouses. Because we were not using any ETL tool, we wondered whether such a tool could be of any help to get a better overview of our data flows, and/or a better flexibility in changing these flows.

This is how I discovered Talend.

Since then, my company started to use Talend for some particular issues, but not in a production environment. Now, we use it when the cube response is too heavy according to the need, and for one-shot data transfers.

But I am convinced that the tool is very efficient, that is why I spent some time with friends of mine, who have become Talend-addicts, to help the community.

I'm quite familiar with the English language and I've been working in computing for years, so working with an English tool is not a problem. But, when I saw on the Talend Forge website that translations into several languages were needed, I couldn't help to give it a try!

The main reason is that I am tired of reading bad French translations in user guides, documentations, tools, etc. made by automatic translators. Sometimes, it becomes so hard to understand those translations that I prefer to revert back to English!

Then, I spent some time trying to translate different terms used within Talend tools using the Babili tool. The major difficulty was to find the closest meaning while not increasing dramatically the number of characters used!

But I can see now that the translation into French is almost over. I'm pretty eager to see the final result!

Josep-Curto

Hello, my name is Josep Curto and I work for a System Integrator in Spain. There I focus on implementing Business Intelligence systems with a special attention to the Open Source Business Intelligence market.

I have driven my career with a clear vocation for higher education, being a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). At UOC, I teach Business Intelligence.

I'm also a Channel Expert for BeyeNETWORK Spain, writing articles about BI.

How did I come to Talend Babili?

For my job, I need to monitor the Business Intelligence Market. In the past few years, a collection of open source products have come on the market. These products help reduce our clients TCO without any quality or functionality loss. In fact, they can address all enterprise needs. Thus, I usually recommend Talend Studio and Talend Profiler as the right choice.

Thanks to Sandra Masse, I discovered the Talend Babili Project during a product presentation in Spain. I found Babili that was the perfect way for me to collaborate with Talend because the Spanish translation had not started yet and I usually don't have time to suggest enhanced functionalities or report bugs. I hope this way, more people get to know the Talend products in Spain. This project is a great idea because the community can take part to it easily.

Kensuke-Saeki

Hello, Everyone. My Name is Kensuke Saeki.
My company works in Computer System Integration in Japan.
I joined the Talend Babili Japanese Translation in the Talend project.

I work with the Open Source BI programs from Jaspersoft.
The ETL tool from Talend is very useful and powerful. However, I felt the program needed a Japanese translation.
That is why I joined the Talend Babili project.
In Japan, although an application is efficient and there is no problem using Japanese code and data inside a system, it doesn't become popular without a Japanese interface.

Recently, many U.S and European OSS engineers and organizations arrived in Japan.
I hope these communities and OSS Engineers can exchange with each other.

There is still a big market for BI in Japan so I am hoping to help promote Jaspersoft and Talend.
These tools will be promoted to users and engineers.

When I heard Talend was interested in Japan, I felt the time had come: I could be an actor to help Talend on the Japanese market! I hope Talend will change the Japanese BI market.

Timur-Laykov

Hello, my name is Timur Laykov and I work for a company that provides internet services.

I have a good deal of experience working with Data Warehouses and ETL tools. I have worked extensively with a commercial off the shelf ETL tool, and although it was good - I did not like it's proprietary programming language, it was very expensive and some design decisions were simply not right.

When I first heard about Talend, I was really impressed, an open source ETL tool that can generate source code in Perl or Java! That was a vision of mine from the day I started using ETL-s.

Then I started digging deeper and found a lot of great things about Talend - it is flexible - you can expand it easily, create your own components, or just embed some Java or Perl code in your Talend application. It also has this neat concept of context variables, metadata, a great user interface and tons of components that can be used to build your application, and it works on virtually any platform that can run Perl or Java.

So when we decided to create ETL-s for our new Data Warehouse - I immediately suggested we use Talend. We decided to give it a try, and that was a wise decision. Our first application is now running in production and has been live for almost a year , even better we have never had problems with it. It's stable, reliable, easy to maintain and very flexible - we have already made changes, and found that was very easy and straight-forward.

Of course with all software - there were some issues. The difference with Talend is unlike other proprietary software, you don't need to wait for Talend developers to address the issue. There are great tutorials on Talend, so you can easily fix a bug. Internally Talend is solid and well-designed - it is easy to understand the code - and easy to make changes. We also created a set of our own components to suit our needs.

There were some issues that we could not resolve by ourselves, but we had a community to assist us. I posted my comments on Talend forum - and immediately got a response. I submitted a ticket - and was so surprised that when I downloaded the next version of Talend - my requested functionality was there! I really feel like I have participated in building a great product, it's a great feeling that your ideas are appreciated and valued by the community.

After my first experience with the Talend forums - I started to post more - to express my vision on the product and the application architecture. I have always found a lot of support and helpful hints from the community members - the Talend community is strong and very helpful - thanks guys!

As a native Russian speaker I also take part in Russian Translation on Babili. I started to translate documentation to Russian at talend.infosystemsolutions.com . I am collecting tips and tricks for Talend that I will post on this website.

Let me know if you need any advice or Talend consultation. We have a team of developers that can help you with your Talend project - big or small. You can contact us through this web form.

Community Forum profile

Steve-Maziarz

Hi, Steve Maziarz here.

I wanted to take a moment to tell you about how I came to find Talend Open Studio.

I was using a product from a major international computer firm which claimed to be a graphical ETL tool. After two months of working with this tool, it became painfully obvious that it was NEVER going to be able to live up to the task. So, I had to search for something else. During my search, I discovered Talend Open Studio. I downloaded it and started teaching myself the basics. Within two weeks of using Talend, I had accomplished more than I had in the prior two months.

Talend Open Studio was far above anything else I had found and the price was certainly right. Even better, when I did encounter problems, there was a robust community of people ready to help out. I was amazed at the built in connectivity and components. To this day, I still am.

I've used Talend for a number of projects at my current employer and will continue to be a fan and supporter of the product in other endeavors as well. I can see myself using Talend for many years to come in many ways.

In addition to my regular employment, I also assist Real Estate Agents in promoting their properties with virtual tours. Learn more at http://realtorvr.net

I have also created an eBook on squeezing the most miles out of each gallon of fuel. It is available for free. Just visit http://getmygasbook.com

I also maintain a presence on a number of social and business networking sites. I have over thirty years of experience in technology, business and marketing and enjoy helping others solve difficult business problems.

Finally, if you're just considering using Talend Open Studio, I can only say: DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY NOW and get started today. It's a wise choice!

Community Forum profile

Dylan-Jones

Hi, my name is Dylan Jones.

I am the founder of Data Quality Pro.com and Data Migration Pro.com, free professional communities and education resources dedicated to data quality and data migration professionals.

The sites are for people who wish to take their career or business to the next level so you will find everything from career advice to expert articles and tutorials on all range of data quality and data migration subjects.

On Data Quality Pro for example we have recently released a free 21-page tutorial on how to use Talend Open Profiler.

We've also given away a free data quality pattern analyser, a version for Oracle (which is great for working with Open Profiler) and the other version is for Microsoft Access.

You can get the free Talend Open Profiler tutorial and Data Quality Pro data quality tools here:

• Talend Open Profiler Tutorial: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/data-profiling-tutorial
• Data Quality Pattern Analyser for MS-Access: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/pattern-analyser-access
• Data Quality Pattern Analyser for Oracle: http://www.dataqualitypro.com/pattern-analyser-oracle

This means you now have a free toolkit to discover and manage defective data in your data management projects.

I must say, I've really been impressed with the direction Talend have taken with Open Profiler.

For such a young product it has a wide variety of beneficial features that will support anyone undertaking data initiatives such as data integration, business intelligence, data quality improvement or data migration.

Data profiling is one of the pillars of effective data quality management. By using the Talend Open Profiler in a structured approach that we introduce in the first tutorial (further tutorials to follow), you are getting a huge amount of value for what is essentially a free data quality tool.

I would really welcome your views on what data quality topics or tutorials you would like to see in our communities and I'll do my best to get them published.

Please contact me if you have any suggestions (click here)

Thank you,
Dylan

Founder & Editor

Data Quality Pro: http://www.dataqualitypro.com

Data Migration Pro: http://www.datamigrationpro.com

Volker-Brehm

My name is Volker, I live in Germany and work in the IT-department of a financial institute.

Even if we don't use Talend Open Studio in our company I was so impressed with the functionalities it offers that I decided to support the community about one year ago.

What is so special about Talend Open Studio that I took this decision to support it?

For years now, I've been working at improving my department's development processes and, doing this, I've been dealing with many different issues.

For example:

Imagine you have a bug tracking database, a list of requirements from your sponsor (they often use "state of the art" tools like Excel) and a list of planned releases on a web page. Now you want to figure out which requirement belongs to which release and which bugs are associated with them. So just connect the different systems and documents, do some magic and have fun with your new, valorized data. By the way, the magic is done by Talend Open Studio...

And why Talend Open Studio and nothing else?

I often need to write scripts for parsing, converting, importing and exporting tasks, I'd say, even more often than the number of components in Talend Open Studio (and there are a lot).

I obviously thought about creating a generic system or framework that would do the job, but I didn't quite find the time for it. And I found out that many ideas I've had about this, were actually already offered in Talend Open Studio. So why would I reinvent the wheel again?

Talend Open Studio has many features that make it very flexible and hence interesting:

• It is scalable very easily with your own components
• The functions are not reduced to "simple ETL", you can also handle files, send mail, execute dynamic system commands and much more
• Talend Open Studio is a code generator, you don't have to care about specific servers or heavyweight runtimes.
• All this is hidden behind an intuitive GUI which also offers enhanced documentation, meta-management and different runtime contexts.

Last but not least, when I am not working at the office, or giving you some advice in the talend forums I'm very likely to spend time with my wife and our two daughters. And although I only mentioned them now, they come first in my life.

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See you!
Volker

Olivier-de-R.

My name is Olivier and I'm an engineering student.
Last year, I did an internship with a service provider company where I had to analyse different Open Source Business Intelligence tools including Talend Open Studio.

Since this internship took place, I've used Talend Open Studio for everything! I use it for professional tasks: for data migration and ETL; but also for personal project like: creating a personal feed reader, sending mail/SMS regularly, managing some contact lists, sharing some files automatically with friends.

I'm fond of Talend because it seems to have unlimited functionalities. I've spent the last two months developing new components and, with a minimum knowledge of java, I was able to add new functionalities, to help my clients and to perform my own projects.

I've spent a lot of time asking and answering questions in the forum. I think the Talend Community is one of the most important things for users and developers. It's comforting to know that someone certainly knows the answer to my question.
I hope that I will be able to keep helping you!

You can find in the Ecosystem, some components I developed for the Talend Community:

• tFileOutputPDF
• tJPGMetadata
• tBarChart
• tSendSMS
• tPieChart

Community Forum profile
And if you have time, take a look at my blog (FR): http://blog.ece.fr/olivier_de_rochebouet

Olivier de R. / Proxiad www.proxiad.com