Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about the genesis of the company – how it was built, and a bit of the story of how this company has come about.

Yves de Montcheuil: Talend was founded in 2006. The true founders of Talend are Bertrand Diard and Fabrice Bonan. They were working together for a system integrator, and they were implementing the tools of the large proprietary legacy data integration vendors, who are now our competitors – companies like Informatica, IBM, etc. They were clearly feeling the pain their customers had when it came to the extremely high price of the solution, the complexity of deployment, and the complete lack of flexibility both from the vendor and the technology.

It was a time where open source started to make a difference in some parts of the information system. You had Linux or MySQL, for example, but there was no open source alternative to those proprietary vendors. Quite simply, Bertrand and Fabrice decided to create an open source alternative to proprietary ETL/data integration tools of the time. That is how Talend was born – as an open source data integration vendor. We expanded first into close areas to provide a complete data management platform, and then into the application integration space with the acquisition of Sopera.

At this point we have provided a complete integration platform and its primary characteristic was to be fully unified. No matter which approach you want to take for integration, whether it is master data management of the travel agent I was discussing earlier or application modernization through an enterprise service BUS, we can accommodate it. In the insurance company example, you work in the same environment, everything is reasonable across the platform, and the cost of ownership and training decrease dramatically, as does the ramp-up time to operate to solution as well.

We started to work in the big data space about two years ago, when Hadoop made available a commercial solution. Today, in addition to supporting traditional data use cases, Talend provides the most advanced integration platform for big data, where every single part of the data processing and transformation you want to execute is going to run inside the Hadoop platform. There is no adjunct run time engine you need to deploy. You are going to use Hadoop itself to process the data, which is the most efficient way. Hadoop has been designed exactly for that. That is the quick product history.

The company has around 400 employees. We are deployed on three continents – North America, Western Europe, and Asia. We have approximately 4,000 paying customers. I am specifying “paying customers” because we also have a lot of users of our open source solutions. Our products are all available for download as open source. As I mentioned earlier, we also provide enterprise solutions that are built on top of the open source solution but provide more advanced capabilities for enterprise grade deployment, clustering, reusing and sharing works, etc.

SM: Is the company headquartered in Lyon?

YM: No. I have a home office in Lyon. The company is headquartered just outside of Paris and in Los Altos. We are dual headquartered.

SM: What is the financing history of the company?

YM: We are VC backed. We have raised $62 million from a combination of European and American VCs. Today our reference investors are IDInvest Partners in Paris, Balderton Capital in London and Silver Lake Sumeru in Silicon Valley.

SM: Can you give me a revenue range?

YM: We have been growing 124% each year from inception. The growth last year was approximately 50%.

SM: Thank you very much, Yves. It was a pleasure.

YM: Thank you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend
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