For the first time in Europe and perhaps in the world, a real conference day focusing on Open Source Business Intelligence will be hosted in Paris on March 18th.
Hosted beside the French Computer Museum in Paris business district of La Defense, this conference is very close to the «traditional proprietary conferences». I mean: it's free to attend. And despite to Steve Ballmer's statement «Free software means no free soda» free coffee and free lunch will be provided!

How is this possible? Just because Open Source companies everyday looks more and more like traditional companies with marketing and sponsorship budgets. And for this first ever main conference about OSBI all main vendors have decided to sponsor: SpagoBI, Ingres, Jaspersoft, MySQL, Talend, Pentaho... and tomorrow others.

If you are in Paris in March and if you don't agree with the much closed vision of Gartner about Open Source Business Intelligence just join us! Of course you need to learn French before ;-)

Registration is available on: http://www.amiando.com/forumbiopensource

January: Teradata and NCR separate into two different companies
March: Oracle acquire Hyperion for USD 3 billions
March: SAP acquire Pilot Software a pioneer of BI
April: Cartesis is acquired by Business Objects
May: SAP acquire Outlooksoft
July: Data Mirror is acquired by IBM
September: Cognos acquire Applix
October: SAP acquire Business Objects
November: Cognos is acquired by IBM

Who is missing? We will certainly hear in 2008 news from HP, Microstrategy, Microsoft, Information Builders, QlikTech...

Every day you receive thousands of emails from customers who don't really like all the structured data you need to identify their needs like customer number, transaction reference, product code... Without modifying any part of your IT system, Linkage Discovery will just intercept all email, IM and other text messages. The software will connect in real time to databases of your company and document the message received from the customer. If your customer send a message just saying «My name is John Smith and I ordered last week a DVD player and didn't receive it yet» the software will search in the database all orders from a John Smith placed last week; will add customer ID, transaction ID and all necessary information before giving the hand back to your email management system which will forward the request to an operator. It will even be able to «understand» the content and create information about the sentiment of your customer.
Much better the same system is actually on test with live audio conversation from call centers. Running during the first seconds of the call the software identify the customers with the first words he will say on the phone «Hi, I'm John Smith. I ordered a DVD last week and have not yet received it» In real time the operator will receive on his screen all the structured information available about the customers.
And of course all these unstructured data like emails or phone calls will be saved in the database for future purpose. These associations between emails or voice conversation and structured data from the IT system will be available for traditional BI tools.
Who are your Platinum customers who contacted yesterday your customer service to complain? Tomorrow you will be able to have this report on your desk every morning.

More seriously, this acquisition is a sign. A sign of a new consolidation step in Business Intelligence market. A sign of a new race! If you are a BI vendor you should very quickly find an exit for your company. In a couple of years they will be only one place or two for an independent BI vendor. All the other majors will be acquired by Enterprise Framework Vendors (EFV - a new acronym I just invented...) Targets will be Cognos, Information Builders, Microstrategy, perhaps Teradata... and smaller like QlickTech. Big players will be IBM, HP, Oracle and a couple of others.
Two many BI vendors for a small number of EFV... Be the first to join or run after the train...

Talend is an open source vendor of the same named ETL tool. It announced this week a migration package specially designed for Genio customers, an ETL from Leonard's Logic acquired by Hummingbird, itself acquired by Open Text.
« For companies using obsolete tools like Genio, a migration project to a new ETL can be risky and should mean a redevelopment of all their integration architecture, » explains Yves de Montcheuil, Marketing Director at Talend. « It is never easy to switch from an ETL to another; you should often take all processes one after the other and recode it ».
The customer's IT service can face a collective memory problem if all processes, developed sometimes many years before, are not or poor documented.
Talend propose a package of a specially developed migration tool and expertise based on Talend knowledge of ETL tools.
The first step is an audit, of around three days, to analyze Genio repository, collect information about processes and evaluate labor cost to migrate all of them.
Then the migration itself, using the tool developed by Talend and of course their ETL. This tool can drill down into Genio repository to collect metadata and automatically migrate them to the Talend repository.
Usage of Talend ETL is of course needed but the customer can choose any available version including the open source one.
Genio's three main customers are actually migrating but prefer their name not to be revealed before they can really avoid Genio from their IT system.
According to Talend this process can save between 50 and 70 % of migration cost of for traditional ETL migration project. Based on this success Talend is evaluating the development of new migration tools from Sunopsis (Oracle) and DataStage (IBM).