• Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
• Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
• Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice.

(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)

People advising Doug — who come to think of it actually are Contributing Editors to Intelligent Enterprise or something like that — included Cindi Howson, Seth Grimes, three others, and me.

And if past is prologue, I will now get a flood of PR emails calling my attention to this award that I already have both participated in and blogged about.

As usual, the sense:nonsense ratio on these lists was pleasingly high. Analytic DBMS vendors cited included IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, Sybase, and Teradata in the “Most influential” group, with Aster, Greenplum, HP, Infobright, and Vertica among the “To watch” crowd. It’s tough to argue with those selections, whose most questionable element is probably the not-ridiculous supposition that HP could do something interesting over the coming year. Cloudera and Intersystems also made the list, deservedly.

All three of QlikTech, Tableau, and TIBCO made the list, which is appropriate given the potential for and interest in interactive data exploration technology.  The BI majors, independent or otherwise, were all on as well. In text mining, Doug included Attensity and Clarabridge, which I think is exactly right. (Plus OpenCalais.)  Upon reflection, I probably should have nominated Mark Logic, even though most of its business is non-enterprise; but hey, nobody’s perfect, and the same goes for lists. Open source was well represented, with Apache, Actuate, Jaspersoft, Eclipse, Infobright, Nuxeo and R all being cited (but not Ingres or Pentaho). Kalido made the list, with my endorsement, their silly I-CASE like marketing messaging notwithstanding.

Speaking of imperfections — there only are a few category names, and so category assignments can be pretty bizarre. (In an ideal world, middleware wouldn’t be included under “enterprise applications”.) Greenplum hasn’t really “extended” its DBMS with a “cloud” option. As much as I’d like Netezza to be more influential than SAP, that’s probably not the best way to rank them. And there are a number of “This company is on a roll!” kinds of comments that I wouldn’t necessarily endorse.

But those are all nitpicks. On the whole, it’s another nice job.

• Ab Initio sells high-end data integration software.
• Ab Initio commonly costs $1/2 million or so.
• Ab Initio’s core claims include:
  • “It just works”
  • Ab Initio has great performance, even on big tasks.
  • Unlike many competitors, Ab Initio has an integrated product line written from scratch. (Hence the “Ab Initio” name.)
• Like most data integration software – Talend is an exception – Ab Initio includes an execution engine.
• Everybody agrees that Ab Initio’s software has great performance, although Talend claims to come close and Expressor claims to be faster yet. But rivals assert that besides having high license fees, Ab Initio’s software is also very consumptive of hardware resources. Certainly I’d suggest checking that aspect carefully if you ever get into an Ab Initio POC.  Perhaps that’s what Ab Initio means by saying its software uses any and all hardware resources. )
• Price isn’t the only regard in which Ab Initio is hard to do business with. Another is secretive business practices. For example, Ab Initio – confident in the quality of its software – pushes prospects toward POCs (Proofs-Of-Concept). But it wraps so many NDA requirements around these that some prospects walk away.
• Not surprisingly, Ab Initio has added lots of features over the years, especially in response to prospect or customer requests. Examples I was given include:
  • IBM OS/390 support (including COBOL copybooks, etc.)
  • SOAP/XML support. Associated with that is a story that boils down to “With great encapsulation, one can change a complex system of data integration processes incrementally without going crazy.”
  • A compressed file system that can directly store 100s of TBs of user data, with very fast query performance. Apparently, this is not at the extremes of inflexibility, as it is realistic to have up to 5-6 keys on a table (at least). Associated with that is a story that boils down to “Hey, if you’re only getting at something via web services, you’re limited in how you can query it anyway. Worst case – your needs expand and you decide to put the data back in a true DBMS after all.”
  • Similarly, Ab Initio claims that its software is easier to use than rival, cobbled-together products. While Ab Initio may not dispute the existence of products that can get data integration tasks done more simply, it argues that these products do a lot less than Ab Initio does.

• Talend revenue grew 6-fold in 2008.
• Talend revenue is expected to grow 3-fold in 2009.
• Talend had >400 paying customers at the end of 2008.
• Talend estimates it has >200,000 active users. This is based on who gets automated updates, looks at documentation, etc.
• ~1/3 of Talend’s revenue is from large customers. 2/3 is from the mid-market.
• Talend has had ~700,000 downloads of its core product, and >3.3 million downloads in all (including documentation, upgrades, etc.)

It seems that Talend’s revenue was somewhat shy of $10 million in 2008.

Specific large paying customers Yves mentioned include:

• Virgin Mobile – for a full EDW, apparently
• US Cellular – collecting technical information from, you guessed it, cell towers
• Verizon (the part of Verizon that is using Vertica)
• eBay
• Yahoo

Yves also told a cool story in operational rather than analytic data integration, but I’ll save that for another time.

Yves and I also got a little more concrete than last time discussing what the community contributes to Talend. Specifics included:

• Of Talend’s ~400 different connectors, ~1/3 come from the community.
• Community members support each other, and paying customers as well, in the forums.
• Talend has ~1000 beta testers.
• Community members seem to be doing a lot of language translation. For the 12,000 text strings in the Talend Open Studio user interface, translation is at least half done in at least Chinese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

I once again forgot to ask Yves the difference between the community and paid product editions, but a visit to the Talend show booth later on cleared that up quickly. The three biggies seems to be:

• Administrative console
• Activity monitoring console (I gather that’s the run-time administrative piece, more or less)
• Shared (as opposed to single-user) repository

Yves also offered the results of a user survey (free and paid alike). Supposedly, the reasons for selecting Talend, in declining order, are:

1. Performance
2. Features
3. Vendor independence (presumably vs. database management vendors)
4. Price
5. Access to source code

Frankly, while I don’t doubt Yves’ sincerity in sharing those results, I take them with a grain of salt. Survey design is notoriously tricky.

• Talend does open source data integration.  If you’ve heard of one open source data integration company, it’s probably Talend.
• Specifically, Talend has two main product lines — ETL/ELT and data quality.
• Open source aside, Talend’s main unusual feature is that its transformations are generated rather than interpreted in some kind of engine.  I forget what the exact list of possible target languages is.
• In particular, the transformations can be executed in the database engine.  This is why Talend claims strong support for ELT (Extract/Load/Transform) along with ETL (Extract/Transform/Load).
• One consequence of not having a run-time engine is that Talend charges for development seats.  Frankly, charging for run-times is usually a lot better as a business model than charging for development seats, but Talend seems to have little choice in the matter.
• Talend seems to have considerable community contributions in the form of individual connectors — there’s apparently even iPod integration — but little other community code.  Neither part of that seems surprising.
• Talend has the usual dual-edition business model. I forget whether there’s any feature difference between the editions, or whether it’s all support/indemnification/etc.
• Talend is a French company.  Most Talend execs seem to be French, although some of them — Yves included — have at various times lived and worked in the US.
• IIRC, Yves said Talend has around 80 employees, and is venture funded.
• Talend has announced partnerships with various database and business intelligence vendors.  I don’t know how much these amount to, however.  E.g., there was a Teradata partnership announcement this week, but no Teradata folks seemed to be aware of it; indeed, few if any had even heard of Talend.  CTO Luke Lonergan of Greenplum does have a high opinion of Talend — but has he ever sent any business their way? I don’t know.