For the past few years, Gartner analysts Ted Friedman and Jess Thompson have been collaborating on the topic of the convergence of Application and Data Integration. This session at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (#GartnerAADI) was a great summary of the key points, under the tile: “Application and Data Integration: Converge Them For Maximum Value.” Because at the end of the day, it’s about getting value, right?

• The Ted & Jess show at #GartnerAADI: converge #DataIntegration & #ApplicationIntegration for maximum value
• What's the best tool for the job? is the wrong question. #GartnerAADI pic.twitter.com/KFXdrMrB2f
• By 2017, 50% of all orgs will have federated their application & #DataIntegration COEs #GartnerAADI
  

More on information management at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (#GartnerAADI). Ted Friedman delivered a fast paced session on Big Data: what it is, how to define it, some of the risks. Impossible to cover it all in half an hour, but nevertheless a good way of busting a few myths!

• #GartnerAADI is keeping @ted_friedman busy today... After the #DataIntegration #MagicQuadrant he's about to talk about #BigData.
• Eventually the words #BigData will go away and it will just be there. As it has always been! #GartnerAADI
• Lots of hype, many definitions of #BigData #GartnerAADI pic.twitter.com/9dwhOsDGWC
  

Information management’s mindshare is growing at every iteration of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (#GartnerAADI). Ted Friedman may still introduce himself as “the guy from the other team”, but sessions are getting more and more crowded, and so does (I suspect) his one-on-one agenda. Gartner clearly needs to bring more Information Management analysts to this conference!

Anyway, to set the stage on Information Management, Ted started with the “core” of this market: Data Integration. The official session topic was a review of the Magic Quadrant, but the content was richer than just that.

• Waiting for @ted_friedman's #DataIntegration #MagicQuadrant to begin at #GartnerAADI
• Now that's a good idea: @ted_friedman has his Twitter handle on his title slide. #GartnerAADI
• Integration is taking multiple things of independent design and origin and making them work together to achieve common purpose #GartnerAADI
  

The first session I attended today clearly lived up to expectations. At the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (#GartnerAADI), Massimo Pezzini provided an in-depth review of CSI, aka Cloud Service Integration (no, not the TV show…) – probably one of the fastest growing integration segments today. 

It is really interesting to see how the analyst’s thinking is evolving and morphing to the continuous shifts in the market.  I have been tracking Gartner’s view of this space for some time now, and the least we can say is that this is a very fluid market.

• The session’s actual title was “Cloud Service Integration: Enabling SaaS and On-premises Applications Working Together”.
• Second day of #GartnerAADI starts with Massimo Pezzini on #Cloud integration: on-prem & SaaS apps
• Any app portfolio does or will include both on-prem and cloud apps. #GartnerAADI
  

The second part of the opening keynote of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (#GartnerAADI) featured analyst Andy Kyte discussing the changes in culture required for IT to embrace the ever growing needs of the business, and be successful at doing so. The key here is to “design for life” with the big picture in mind.

I know my tweets won’t do justice to an engaging and energetic presenter who delivered a thought-provoking keynote, but these nuggets are interesting (I hope!)

• Demand unmet by IT creates a market, in which vendors are going to jump and bypass IT. #GartnerAADI
• How does IT embrace the need for ever growing demand, and be successful at it? #GartnerAADI
• In best organizations, there is only one team and it's the company. #GartnerAADI
  

The great thing about the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summits (#GartnerAADI) is that the US and EMEA events are nicely spread across the year. This makes for less repeat content, and maximizes the opportunities to interact with the ecosystem. This week, I am tweeting and blogging from the London event.

During the opening keynote by Gartner analyst and conference chair David Mitchell Smith, the Nexus of Forces was a key focus, hence the illustration that goes with this post. I will be posting separately the second part of the keynote by Andy Kyte.

• #GartnerAADI keynote is starting. Conference Chair David Mitchell Smith setting the stage.
• Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Future. Great theme for #GartnerAADI
  

No, this is a not a post about The Big Easy, the famed city on the Mississippi River.  But about how Big and Easy don’t have to be antagonistic when it comes to describing data…

There is a general perception out there that big data isn’t easy. It brings many benefits, some immediately tangible and some that will become clearer in the longer run. But in order to leverage big data, organizations need expertise that few engineers or business users possess. Gartner puts it quite eloquently:

“Over the next 24 months to 36 months a main challenge that organizations will face will be recruiting, onboarding, retaining and developing people with advanced information management/analytics skills. These people include data scientists, information leaders, data stewards, chief data officers and information architects.”

According to Wikipedia, the impala is a medium-sized African antelope im its name comes from the Zulu language meaning "gazelle". Like elephants, it is found in savannas, and this may be the link with Hadoop. Impala is also the name of Cloudera’s SQL-on-Hadoop project, launched in beta at Strata last October and just released in version 1.0.

SQL-on-Hadoop – wait a minute… isn’t it what Hive is for?  Well, yes and no. HiveQL certainly brings a set of SQL-like commands to Hadoop data. The big issue with Hive: it’s very slow. More precisely, it’s not interactive. Queries take a long time to be “parsed” and distributed across the cluster. Response times can reach the minute, which is highly impractical for interactive use. It works fine for batch use (response times actually don’t vary much based on the dataset size), but when users want to mine Hadoop data, perform interactive queries or drill-downs, profile data, etc. – they end up spending lots of time glaring at their screen (or fetching more coffee than they should).

Talend’s new tagline, introduced a few weeks ago is Integration at Any Scale. Scale, in this context, has many meanings, and after focusing recently on the data angle, I would like to highlight today another dimension: scaling projects.

Integration is a very important part of any IT project. In their Predicts 2013 for Application Integration (you need to be a Gartner client to access this document), Gartner provided this Strategic Planning Assumption:

“By 2018, more than 50% of the cost of implementing 90% of new large systems will be spent on integration.”

In the proprietary software world, the beta program is the only way to get insight into what’s coming in the next release. Sure, roadmap presentations under NDA with the Chief Architect also give a good idea – but the truth is, one doesn’t know how it works until they can actually kick the tires.

Open source is different. The development process is open, and progress on features is visible to anyone who cares to follow the project tracker. And since builds are produced on a regular basis, anyone can download the latest milestone release and try out the new features, pretty much before everyone.  Now, of course, before everyone also means before the QA teams, and it hence means that not everything in a milestone release is production-grade. That’s the usual tradeoff between early access and solid, tested features.  And that’s one of the key contributions of the community: in return for this early access, they provide feedback that is used by R&D and QA to tune the software.

Talend is making changes in executive management. Jim, who had joined the team earlier this year as Executive Chairman, is stepping in the CEO role. And Bertrand, Talend’s co-founding CEO, who has been at the helm of Talend since the beginning, is now Chief Strategy Officer.

What does this mean for Talend?  Is this a new book? A new chapter? Or something else entirely?

The trajectory we have been on since inception is amazing. In just over 6 years, Talend has grown over 120% each year in average (CAGR). We are now 400 people in 7 countries on 3 continents. Our customer base continues to expand, with our reference list starting to resemble an Oracle airport billboard (you know, the “XX of Fortune XX run Oracle”?). We keep adding logos and awards to our Wall of Fame.

A few weeks ago, we introduced a new tagline for Talend: Integration at Any Scale. Scale, in this context, has many meanings, and I would like to focus today on one of them: the scale of data.

Data volumes are growing. Research from IDC, compiled by Wikibon, indicates that data production will increase 44 times by 2020. Of course, your mileage may vary – but today, every organization is bracing for the big data deluge.

Final post in the series of live tweetports from Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Texas, the guest keynote by Luke Williams, an “internationally recognized authority on innovation leadership”: Disruptive Thinking: Fostering a Culture of Game-changing Leadership.

Because the content was so fast paced, and so good, I am tweetporting here through the tweets of several attendees instead of just mine. Richer content!  

• @EZaliagiris: Luke Williams, author of DISRUPT, speaking at the #gartnermdm summit! #justlearnin'
• @mdmcentral: #GartnerMDM Luke Williams ideas need sex with other ideas in order to grow, adapt, and gain adoption. How true.
• ‏@ydemontcheuil: It's becoming more difficult than ever to predict what's going to happen in the near future. Williams at #GartnerMDM
• @ydemontcheuil: New business models emerging and disrupting. Williams at #GartnerMDM
  

Next in the series of live tweetports from Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Texas, I attended Ted Friedman’s presentation: Data Integration Technology and Architecture: Infrastructure for Efficient and Effective Master Data Delivery. As expected, a great summary of what’s happening on the market and where it’s going.

• Full room for @ted_friedman's session on #DataIntegration: foundational block for #MDM. #GartnerMDM
• As soon as we started to span multiple systems each with its own data, we created a #DataIntegration challenge. @ted_friedman at #GartnerMDM
• One third of CEOs have no clue which type of data will be disruptive for their industry in next 5 years. Scary. @ted_friedman at #GartnerMDM
• A simple definition of #DataIntegration: enable data structures designed independently to be leveraged together @ted_friedman at #GartnerMDM
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Texas, I attended the presentation by the three finalists of the Gartner MDM Excellence Award: FedEx, Grainger, Swiss Re. Three good presentations by well-rounded practitioners (coincidentally, two of them had a cold… maybe the result of spending too much time in this hotel-under-a-bubble?). But one disturbing point, which I summarized in my last 2 tweets:

• Disturbed by fact that 3 #MDM Excellence Award finalists are humongous corporations with very big projects. #GartnerMDM
• No #MDM Excellence possible at smaller scale? In midsize orgs? Odd. #GartnerMDM

To which Andrew White responded:

• @ydemontcheuil #GartnerMDM great point. We did see some smaller programs but they were less rounded or advanced. Maybe next year?

Being the skeptic that I am, I would argue that the “rounded” criteria may not apply well to smaller projects. On the other hand, the Barcelona finalists were with smaller organizations (not SMB though – just not as humongous).  In any case, the honus is also on us, vendors, to provide the proper references and candidates… we will see about this next year.

The title of this presentation at Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Texas had caught my eye in the agenda: The Big Data Revolution Versus the Information Governance Monarchy. It had left me wondering how can Mark Beyer, a scholar in ontology, oppose in the same title Revolution (which is an event), and Monarchy (which is a political regime)? Granted, some countries have a history of using revolutions to dispose of regimes. But hopefully, big data’s purpose is not to get rid of information governance…

At the end of the day, Mark did not really oppose these two concepts but discussed some of the interactions and dependencies. Read on…

After only being able to catch bits of content via Timo Elliott’s tweestream at the Barcelona conference, I was finally able to catch the full live content of by Doug Laney‘s excellent and thought-provoking presentation on Infonomics: How to Value and Manage Your Information Assets.

Spoiler alert: I am starting this Tweetport with my last tweet:

• @doug_laney #Infonomics: one of the best presentations I have seen at a conference, right on par with some guest keynotes. #GartnerMDM

The content was pretty dense, and I was able to capture only bits of it. Need to do more reading, this is a really great subject to explore, right there with the topic of information as a strategic asset on which I have previously written (here we go again, the “asset” concept!  It does mean so many things…)

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Texas, I attended the opening keynote: Launchpad for Assured Business Outcomes and Transformation, presented by Gartner’s lead MDM analysts Andrew White and Bill O’Kane.

• Opening keynote for #GartnerMDM: @BillOKane & @MDMCentral aka Andrew White
• Andrew White starts off with Information as an Asset: ROI of managed information beats ROI of maintained information. #GartnerMDM
• #MDM is a step on the path from immature information management to mature # EIM - White at #GartnerMDM
  

Held this year at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine, Texas, just a few miles from the DFW airport, the Gartner Master Data Management Summit is, as usual, combined with the Gartner BI & Analytics Summit – after all, they overlap to a large degree both in content and analysts covering the space. Through a series of Tweetports, I will be sharing some comments and impressions on the sessions I am able to attend. The agenda looks great, and there seems to be a lot of new content that wasn’t presented at the EMEA Summit in Barcelona that I covered last month on this blog.

Having come in a bit early, I was able to attend the Guest Keynote from the BI & Analytics Summit: Nate Silver, Statistician, Founder of The New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, discussed The Signal and The Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail - But Some Don't.

On Tuesday, the fifth Talend Connect was held at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco – and it was a huge success. After Boston, Frankfurt, Paris and London, this day was a great opportunity for our clients, users, partners and staff to meet, network, share information and have some fun.

After breakfast, everyone gathered in the main session room, and the unlucky ones who were not able to grab a seat went to the overflow room where a live feed broadcasted the sessions.

The first session of the day was a live discussion between our conference moderator, the ever-excellent Mark Jeffries, and Talend’s CEO & co-founder Bertrand Diard. Among many topics, Bertrand highlighted the changes in the IT landscape and how open source drives innovation.

The Eclipse community has voted!  During the second phase of the Eclipse Awards 2013, they selected three Eclipse-based projects for the Best Application category: Talend Open Studio, Bonita Open Solution, and Chronon 4 Ops.  Winners will be announced at EclipseCon in Boston on March 25.

Of course, everyone at Talend is proud to have been nominated and even more proud to be part of this short list. It is a tremendous recognition by the Eclipse community, of which Talend is a proud partner, of the advanced work our engineers are doing on the Eclipse platform – one of the foundations of our unified platform.

AFDEL – the French Software Vendors Association – of which Talend is a Board Member, is continuing to grow its presence outside of France, providing an expanded platform for members who want to expand their business in the US.

After the launch of the West Coast branch (hosted by Talend) in November 2011, AFDEL has inaugurated this week its East Coast branch. Hosted by Trace One in Boston, the branch will provide networking and support opportunities in the North East.

This week our partner Hortonworks announced a whole set of initiatives and projects to make Hadoop more enterprise-ready. As I have written in the past, the Hadoop distribution vendors (Hortonworks, Cloudera, etc.) are playing a key role in the deployment of Hadoop, making it “enterprise-acceptable”.

Among the initiatives announced this week, Talend is very interested in The Stinger Initiative.  I have no idea whether this name is derived from the namesake portable surface-to-air missile (which, according to Google, can also be mounted on the Apache helicopter - or used to shoot it down), or from the appendix that insects use to deliver venom.  But anyway, it’s a neat name.

Last week, Amazon Redshift, the fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud from Amazon Web Services (AWS) went generally available after a few months of successful limited preview. Redshift has been announced last November at the AWS re:Invent, the cloud group’s first annual conference in Las Vegas and makes use of technology from Paraccel – a long-standing technology partner of Talend.

Pretty early in the game, Amazon had asked us to commit to support for Redshift. The philosophy of the Data Warehousing as a Service (DWaaS) is totally consistent with Talend’s mission to bring integration at any scale to any type of project, Amazon’s aim being to bring down the cost and complexity of data warehousing, with prices starting at $1000 per terabyte per year and a fully managed platform with zero administration or maintenance.

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended this presentation by Andrew White and Bill O’Kane: To Multi-Domain MDM or Not? That Is the Magic Quadrant Question. And indeed, that is the question...

• Multi domain #MDM? Andrew White aka @MDMCentral and @BillOKane at #GartnerMDM
• #MDM is a Gordian Knot. But Andrew did not bring his sword... I guess Bill could have had a laser saber yesterday though. #GartnerMDM
• The genesis of the #MDM market: there was CDI, and there was PIM. #GartnerMDM
• There is no magic in the #MagicQuadrant process! says Andrew White at #GartnerMDM
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended Andrew White’s presentation: How to Evolve MDM Toward Enterprise Information Management. My notes from Andrew’s presentation are below.

• Andrew White going to discuss what's beyond #MDM: Information Management. #GartnerMDM
• Ability to respond to events is tightly linked to the accuracy of data - Andrew White at #GartnerMDM
• #MDM provides the power to say no to the business - Andrew White at #GartnerMDM
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended Mark Beyer’s early morning presentation: What's the Impact of Big Data on MDM. My notes are below.

• Master data is just master data. There is no master meta data, no big master data... Mark Beyer at #GartnerMDM
• Gartner has 12 dimensions for #BigData. At some point they had 54... glad they simplified things. #GartnerMDM
• #BigData comes in all forms, not only tweets or social data. Meter data, machine data, logs etc are also #BigData. Mark Beyer at #GartnerMDM
  

This post was contributed by Talend’s CTO Cédric Carbone

RTFM*!! How many times are Technical Support and Helpdesk staff tempted to tell this acronym to a customer asking yet again the same question, clearly printed in the user documentation.  Peers in Forums are usually less diplomatic and won’t hesitate to use the acronym – or to spell it out.

The fact is – users don't read the documentation. For their TV set, their washing machine, their car, their software. Unless they are really forced to (by their spouse, their teacher, their boss).  I'm not arguing or complaining about this, nope, it's just a fact, that's all... And it is especially true when you have several manuals for one piece of software: installation guide, user manual, administrator guide, reference guide, etc.

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended Ted Friedman’s presentation: Build Your Data Quality Competency to Ensure High-Fidelity Master Data.

• #DataQuality and #MDM are one and the same thing. If you're doing one, you're doing the other... Good opening by @ted_friedman #GartnerMDM
• Tools also overlap between #DataQuality and #MDM technology markets. @ted_friedman at #GartnerMDM
• @ted_friedman shows an elephant that does not represent #BigData - it's not yellow! #GartnerMDM
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended Bill O’Kane’s presentation: Improving Master Data Management Maturity With Gartner's MDM Maturity Model. And at the same time, tracked other tweetstreams… 

• RT @doug_laney: #GartnerBI & #GartnerMDM discussion: Shhh... trading information for goods/services can avoid the tax man. #infonomics
• Information as an asset requires repeatable, distributed, disciplined governance. #GartnerMDM
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Master Data Management Summit in Barcelona, I attended the presentation by the three finalists of the Gartner MDM Excellence Award, while I was following in parallel a session by Doug Laney on Big Data and Analytics Strategy at the co-located Gartner BI Summit, through Timo Elliott’s tweestream (retweeted here).

• RT @timoelliott: #GartnerBI @doug_laney "don't confuse data ownership with who it's about"-- hospital runs tests on you, THEY own that data (w/restrictions)
• @ted_friedman launching the final for #MDM Excellence Awards. Attendees will vote. Finalists: GSK, Heineken, Michelin. #GartnerMDM
  

Today, we are launching a new tagline for Talend: Integration at Any Scale. An integral component of the Talend logo, this new tagline reflects more accurately the current strengths and market position of Talend.

What does “launching a new tagline” entail?

Well, from the mundane, logistical side, it means that a bunch of materials need to be updated with the updated logo. This process is well under way, but please be patient as we track down the last dependencies and deplete some leftover inventories of printed materials, goodies or business cards…

Viewed under a more strategic angle, it means that we are updating the message that says what Talend stands for.  Note that I am saying updating, not changing. This new tagline does not reflect a change of course, rather an adjustment to evolving conditions.

I recently posted on this blog a summary of the Etats Généraux de l’Open Source (EGOS) that recently took place in Paris. One of the debates that I believe is an essential part of the process, is to understand why France is not producing more global software champions.

During Le Web conference last December, Informilo published this interesting infographics of “Successful European Venture backed Companies by Country” (you will find the original version here, leaf to pages 4-5 of the PDF publication). Informilo’s “success” criteria are pretty simple: they look at how big was the exit (IPO or M&A), or the potential exit for companies that are still private. Some of the EGOS attendees would probably argue that this is a very capitalistic way of measuring success, that the effect on software freedom, global warming or world hunger are more important – but let’s face it, software freedom is hard to measure, and unfortunately few software entrepreneurs have the power to solve global warming or world hunger unless they first make a ton of money (like Bill Gates).

I always blog in English, but honestly I am having a hard time translating Etats Généraux. Wikipedia suggests Estates General, which frankly does not make a lot of sense. Under France’s Monarchy, it was an advisory body of the constituents of the Kingdom (nobility, clergy, commoners), called by the Monarch to discuss strategic issues such as taxes or war. The last Etats Généraux were assembled in 1789 just before the French Revolution.  The fact that the Etats Généraux de l’Open Source were held on the exact 220^th anniversary of the decapitation of King Louis XVI is, I am sure, a pure coincidence… but enough with French History.

In any case, these Etats Généraux de l’Open Source (EGOS for short) were organized by our friends at Syntec Numerique and especially Alexandre Zapolsky and Michel Isnard. They were placed under the “patronage” (republican “blessing”) of the Minister for Digital Economy, Fleur Pellerin, who graced us with her presence for a whole half an hour – but I am sure (err… I hope) her staff was here taking notes for her.

Back in June, Datameer had released a map of the Hadoop Ecosystem. I then commented on this blog that few communities were as diverse and rich as the Hadoop one, and more importantly that the Hadoop community was not centered on a single vendor, like software communities usually are.

This week, Datameer released an updated version of the ecosystem map. This new map is still consistent with the diversity and breadth of the community.  Without counting the number of players listed, it looks less dense – my guess is that they applied a filter to remove the players with too few connections – in other words, vendors who only work with one other vendor are not really ecosystem players.

Just before the Holidays, long time Talend user Jonathan Bowen released his book Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. Published by Packt, this book covers common uses and scenarios in a simple and practical manner.  As the book progresses, examples become more complex and will help you acquire more advanced integration expertise.

Interestingly, TheVarGuy  recently published a review of this book, and had very good things to say. Indeed, by providing an angle enriched by his real-life experience, author Jonathan Bowen guides the user of Talend Open Studio through a learning experience

I had the privilege of personally meeting Jonathan at Talend Connect London back in the fall, just at the time the book was getting wrapped up, and he was kind enough to ask me to provide a foreword – which I did with great pleasure.

How do you add the word “Big” to “Master Data Management”? Big Master Data Management? Master Big Data Management? It does not matter, really. What matters is the opening of MDM to big data.

Predict: in 2013, big data will drive part of the requirements for MDM programs, recognizing that new types of data are becoming constituents of enterprise information.

Big data technology provides access to “new data”: new types of information coming from outside the firewall, from unsuspected data sources, or from sources that were simply not accessible before. They also provide a renewed access to enterprise “dark data”.

With the first mainstream deployments of Hadoop, IT will be challenged to demonstrate value and measure a return on investment of big data projects.

Predict: away from the hype of data science, big data platforms will be used in 2013 to offload “mundane” tasks that can benefit from extreme and inexpensive scalability.

Tremendous hype has grown about data science and the benefits that can be derived from mining social data, log files, behavioral analysis or other enterprise “dark data”.  While several of these use cases are promising in the mid to long term, they remain experimental and will require new models to be developed.

As promised, after a Cloud Predict, our first Big Data Predict.

2012 has seen the rise of Hadoop as the leading big data platform. It’s certainly not the only one, but today it’s the one that’s getting the most traction.

Predict: after the success of experimental deployments, fueled by an accelerated maturity curve, Hadoop will gain mainstream acceptance in 2013.

Predicting the future is always a risky endeavor. It is also a custom in our industry around this time of the year, and we won’t dodge it.

My first Predict is that… 90% of the 2013 Predicts in our industry will be related to big data or Hadoop. And because of this, I will start this series with a Predict that is not related to big data (no worry, Big Data Predicts will come later).

Cloud Predicts were popular these past few years. We are seeing less of them nowadays. Probably because the cloud platform is now ubiquitous. But, because of this ubiquity, new challenges arise.

Predict: 2013 will see the rise of integration platforms designed to support and be deployed in complex hybrid environments, spanning on-premises and cloud-based.

I recently stumbled upon this nicely built infographic, quite ambitiously titled “The Future of Big Data”, that broaches upon several interesting points and raises some questions (please refer to the infographic for each subject below).

• What’s generating data – or where is big data coming from. Some examples are absolutely correct: smartphone activity/geotracking, RFID in product pallets, or ocean measurements via buoys – but some listed here seem a little less obvious: sensors in pet collars or in gambling casino chips?

After Informatica missing 2 quarters in a row, and revising down their guidance for Q4, it is now Tibco’s turn to preannounce a weak Q4. Since Talend is competing with these two proprietary vendors, and despite the fact that we are privately held, I am been asked more and more often by financials analysts how much impact we are having on these results, and whether the market as a whole is suffering.

Of course, I would love to be able to say that Talend is the primary reason for Informatica and Tibco’s misses.  And we are certainly one of the reasons – since the beginning of the year, we have won more large deals against these incumbents than ever.  Today, organizations implementing large MDM or enterprise integration projects, projects involving technologies such as data integration or ESB, have learnt that there are alternative better choices.  Better because they are more flexible, really integrated, not legacy-dependent, and more predictable.

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from The Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas, I attended Ted Friedman’s presentation: From Conceptual Framework to Pragmatic Solutions: The Key to Information Management Success.  My notes follow.  Again, some interestings ideas for blog posts, once I get a bit of downtime.

• The key to information management success by @ted_friedman #GartnerAADI
• @ted_friedman's presentation will discuss the information capabilities framework and how it applies concretely. #GartnerAADI
• All CIO surveyed could answer question "which information are you missing today, do you wish you had?" #GartnerAADI
• But half of CIOs couldn't say which information would be disruptive/game changing #GartnerAADI
  

It would probably sound a little extreme to come to a Gartner Summit just for the Guest Keynote. But the keynote yesterday at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas, by Pat Lencioni, was worth the trip by itself! I’ll put it right on par with the one from Mark Jefferies at the MDM Summit.  

• #GartnerAADI keynote by @patricklencioni: leading for innovation.
• 2 requirements for organization success: be smart, be healthy. @patricklencioni at #GartnerAADI
• Healthy org: minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, low turnover. @patricklencioni at #GartnerAADI
• Every org is smart enough to succeed. Few create environment that is healthy for success. @patricklencioni at #GartnerAADI
  

At the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas, I attended a solutions provider session by vendor Splunk, who presented use cases with their client Target. While this was a very enlightening presentation, I am still scratching my head as to the relevance of the content for AADI. And no, it was not about predicting pregnancy...

• Solution provider session by Splunk. Yes, I am at #GartnerAADI. Data & apps world is merging. Fast.
• Target explains how they are using Splunk at #GartnerAADI
• Target's software is changing all the time. Agility. #GartnerAADI
• First API go live triggered millions of logs, scattered everywhere, with billions on horizon. Questions asked change everyday. #GartnerAADI
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas, I attended Andrew White’s presentation: Why Master Data Management Should Drive Application Architecture and Integration.  My notes follow.

• Why #MDM should drive application #integration - Andrew White aka @MDMCentral #GartnerAADI
• @MDMCentral starts with description of a nightmarish IT week... #GartnerAADI
• Need to link application and data #GartnerAADI
• We spent millions and millions to build silos, dozens, hundreds of them. How do we ensure consistency of data across them? #GartnerAADI
  

Continuing on a series of live tweetports from the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Las Vegas, I attended a presentation by Massimo Pezzini titled Cloud Service Integration: How to Get Greater Business Value Out of Your Cloud Investments.  And I think that beyond this Tweetport, I came out with a few more ideas to develop further in blog posts.

• Basically, #cloud is not the new SAP of the 80s, all singing all dancing ERP. Does not alleviate fragmentation of data & apps. #GartnerAADI
• Cloud services integration includes cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground... How about ground-to-ground via cloud? #GartnerAADI
• Integration at #cloud speed: from weeks/months to minutes/days. #GartnerAADI
• Cloud integration: expecting no/little coding, packaged integration (less sophistication). #GartnerAADI
• Pezzini introduces the "citizen integrator": bypassing IT, LOB-driven project. Consumerization can't be very far. #GartnerAADI
  

The Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit, held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas is one of several Gartner conferences around the world providing insight into application integration techniques and trends. I have the privilege of attending this event for the second year in a row, having also gone to the London edition in June.

Through a series of Tweetports, I will be sharing some comments and impressions on sessions I was able to attend, starting here with a pretty interesting – and game changing – keynote.

• And the #GartnerAADI keynote is starting! Conference now officially underway.
• The game is changing, and technology enables this shift. #GartnerAADI
• CIO looking where to place their bets - great analogy for a conference in Vegas! #GartnerAADI
• CIO top priorities: increase growth, deliver business solutions. #GartnerAADI
• RT @ted_friedman: Our product (as IT teams) is not to produce or deliver software. It’s to deliver information that drives the business...
  

Big data is often associated with Hadoop. And while Hadoop, and its underlying file system HDFS, store the bulk of big data today, the need exists for a more structured way to manage and expose data, stored in Hadoop or not – without the strong constraints that relational databases impose.

NoSQL databases – the acronym stands for Not only SQL – are today’s answer to this need. It is not my intent to explain in detail the NoSQL concept here, many good resources are available that would do this better than I could. The recent years (months?) have seen the emergence of a number of quickly maturing technologies which adoption is skyrocketing. Matt Aslett from The 451 Group keeps track of NoSQL adoption and skills, his latest update can be found here.

In version 5.2, Talend introduces a key new feature for big data: profiling. Big data quality has been part of the big data story since day one, with a number of key data quality components being ported to Hadoop in the first version of Talend Big Data earlier this year – and we are continuing this effort to streamline big data management.

Profiling is the initial phase of any data integration project. Or at least it should be. Data profiling helps to discover and understand the data that is available, and takes the guesswork out of finding and identifying problem data.  Data duplications, incompleteness and inconsistencies undermine efficiency and usefulness of this data. This is true in “traditional” data sources, and even more true with big data.

At Gartner Symposium & ITxpo, the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends session is one of the most expected and sought after – the room was of course full. This session presented the Gartner annual list of the Top 10 technology trends that companies should be factoring into their strategic planning for 2013-2015.

• Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 at #GartnerSym. Room packed.
• Disruption is coming from the nexus of forces. #GartnerSym
• CIO tech priorities for 2012 are analytics, mobile, cloud, collaboration. #GartnerSym
• The new mobile device battle. Win8 means Microsoft now in the game. #GartnerSym
• RT @mikeflannagan: #gartnersym People, places, things and information could all be connected. what if everything has an activity stream, timeline and services?
  

In a Gartner Symposium & ITxpo session entitled To the Point: Getting on the Wrong Side of Big Data and Big Algorithms - The Emerging Tyranny of Hyperpersonalization, Ray Valdes discussed context-aware computing and how it aggregates disjoint bits of data and connect the dots to deliver hyper-personalized experiences and services.

• #BigData & hyperpersonalization: Ray Valdes starts with story of Target and pregnant teen. #GartnerSym
• Personalization is machine driven. Customization is user driven, based on self selected preferences. #GartnerSym
• Personalization has delivered high value in narrow domain of ecommerce.  For ex, 35% of Amazon sales come from recommendations. #GartnerSym
• Innocuous pieces of data have power when joined together - Valdes at #GartnerSym
  

During a fast paced session in the evening at Gartner Symposium & ITxpo, Ted Friedman presented the Data Integration and Data Quality Magic Quadrants – covering two markets that are part of the same Enterprise Information Management program.

• Here we go: @ted_friedman showing his twitter handler on his opening slide. #MQ session at #GartnerSym
• EIM is holistic program, #DataIntegration & #DataQuality are 2 different technology markets - @ted_friedman at #GartnerSym
• The Rubik's Cube of #DataIntegration: it's a multidimensional space. ted_friedman at #GartnerSym
• First mention of @talend, which "comes in space with #OpenSource approach" - visionary in #MQ. #GartnerSym
  

In this energetic session at Gartner Symposium & ITxpo, Debra Logan & Doug Laney shared how Gartner views changes of information use in the organization through 2020, and how information management and technology will follow or drive this change.

• Information 20/20 at #GartnerSym, with Debra Logan & Doug Laney.
• Moving from hindsight to insight to foresight: value increases but also difficulty. #GartnerSym
• It's all about fostering relationships with partners, suppliers, staff... #GartnerSym
• #GRC has been and remains a very important issue. Turn information governance into value. #GartnerSym
• Guess many view info governance as cost, regulatory requirement. Need to turn this into value creation instead. #GartnerSym
  

Gartner Symposium & ITxpo is Gartner’s annual event for CIOs and senior IT executives. The North American edition takes place every year in October at the Dolphin & Swan hotels in Orlando, Florida. I was privileged to be able to attend the first two days of the event before heading north to New York for Strata Conference & Hadoop World (more on this later).

Through a series of Tweetports, I will be sharing some comments and impressions on sessions I was able to attend, starting here with the energizing and content-rich keynotes.

• #GartnerSym keynote full, was sent to overflow room. Oh well, it's the content that matters.
• Leverage tremendous amount of information at disposal to drive growth - THE #1 key challenge of CEOs. #GartnerSym
• Harness the forces into the nexus - it's all here for you, now. Gartner CEO introducing #GartnerSym
• Gartner's head of research, on stage as hologram, doing great job at pushing all the hot buttons of IT in just a couple minutes. #GartnerSym
  

On Friday, my colleagues Ciaran Dynes, Mark Balkenende and yours truly had the pleasure to brief the BBBT in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. The Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT) is a gathering of leading analysts, experts, and practitioners who attend 1/2-day presentations from interesting and innovative vendors in the BI and data management space. It was my 3^rd year at the BBBT, and as interesting and exciting as always!

Before getting into the Tweetport itself, a few facts that are pretty exciting:

• We had 21 analysts total in attendance, including 7 in the room (many members are international and based as far as Australia, Paraguay or The Netherlands).
• Over the course of the morning, the members generated over 500 tweets – an all-time high for a BBBT session!
• Mark did an extensive demo of Talend’s big data capabilities, using an Amazon EC2-based Hadoop cluster – 100% in the Cloud!
  

After the success of the Boston and Frankfurt events in June, we held this week Talend Connect in Paris (Tuesday) and London (Thursday). The goal of Talend Connect is to “connect” all the constituents of our broad community:partners, customers, users, Talend staff - and to give them the opportunity to meet, receive updates, learn, and network.  Mission accomplished!

Both events were extremely well attended. The audience mix was especially interesting, with an interesting balance of technical users, IT & business management, partners, and of course the Talend teams.

In a recent post, Loraine Lawson asked “Will Hadoop Steal Work from ETL Solutions?”  The point here is: is it possible to use Hadoop to shift some of the heavy lifting that’s part of ETL, in order to shorten the “ELT window” and get data faster into analytics.

I would argue that using Hadoop for ETL is probably one of the most proven use cases of this still-young technology. Not the only one by any means, but one that comes up frequently in presentations at Hadoop conferences and other Strata events.

As the use of Hadoop continues to grow throughout big data projects, so does its maturity. We can recognize today four distinct phases in the maturity curve of Hadoop:

• Pre-open source. At this stage, Hadoop is an internal project at Yahoo where the technology is being used to solve some issues that are very important to Yahoo – but that are also applicable to many other companies and use cases.
• Hadoop becomes open source. Hadoop becomes an Apache project, gathering community contributions – some from user companies, some from vendors or vendors-to-be. However at this stage, one needs to be fairly technology-savvy to use Hadoop. Between the different versions, branches, tools, compatibility issues, etc., Hadoop is not the faint of heart!  Early adopters reap great benefits, but it’s far from being easy.
  

Talend just announced a strategic partnership in the big data arena, with a heavyweight of data and application management: Google!

As part of the Google Cloud Platform, Google just introduced the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program. This program provides Google partners with the tools, training and resources they need to successfully address businesses’ IT needs through the Google Cloud Platform.

A key component of the Google Cloud Platform is Google BigQuery, a fully managed cloud-based service that enables businesses to analyze enormous amounts of data in the cloud.

The final session of the Pacific Northwest BI Summit was the traditional expert predictions. This year, vendors were asked to contribute their own predictions.

As this was a very open and lively discussion, most of the predictions below are not attributed. A number of these Tweets are RTs but I have edited the source.

The next session was titled What CEOs Want to Know About Emerging IT Watch a CEO in an IT meeting and he or she is likely to be reading e-mail, texting, or—in a really bad meeting—maneuvering a nail file. What keeps a C-level executive engaged in IT discussions? When it comes to emerging IT trends, the answer is: Plenty! Hear Jill Dyche of SAS and Kim Dossey of Teradata share experiences in how to get time—and traction—with senior leadership when making the BI pitch!

The next session was titled Agile for Analysts and Software Companies - How the Projects Get Deployed When you hear the word “agile”, what do you think of? Users being agile in the sense of being able to manipulate data quickly in response to business conditions? Or the approach to business intelligence being one that responds to business conditions and delivers accurate results quickly? It’s both and it’s how projects are getting deployed. Join William McKnight of McKnight Consulting Group and Michael Whitehead of WhereScape in an exploration of agile in both contexts.

The next session was titled Big Data and Big Data Analytics: Separating Reality from Hype Big data is big news and it seems every vendor has managed to work a big data message into its marketing. The noise about big data and big data analytics has become so loud that many people feel the term has become abused and overused. Despite the hype, there is no question that customers are gaining value from big data solutions. Colin White of BI Research and Harriet Fryman of IBM help separate the reality from the hype by taking a look at use cases and the benefits customers are gaining from big data.