We have been increasing the use of open source technologies such as Talend for building information solutions for our clients.

Open source tools are now dominating thought leadership and innovation. They have also upped their game in reliability and support options, so they can be considered a viable and cost effective alternative for organisations.

This is backed up by industry recognition for Talend, after sneaking into the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2016 it has moved further up as a leader in the 2017 “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools” report, challenging the traditional heavy weights in this area.

Talend was the only leader that substantially improved its position on the ability to execute axis.

CDP are skilling up on technologies that have come from industry notables such as Yahoo, Twitter, NSA (National Security Agency), Facebook and Linkedin to name a few. These companies were faced with information challenges that traditional relational database management system (RDBMS) vendors could not address. In response, they have built massively scalable industrial strength solutions that have been released to market.

Some of the high profile customers who run their business on open source products that we have chosen to support: Netflix, Spotify, Symantec, Apple, Visa and Bank of America.

Open source, is it free tools for the masses, wahoo?

Open source doesn’t mean free, but it does add a large amount of capability for a fraction of the cost of traditional big vendors. But in reality the open source, service based architecture requires a certain amount of skill and technical savvy to put together, that’s where CDP comes in. We have done the ‘techy’ stuff to put together deployable containers that all play nicely together. We help our clients build the solutions and provide mentoring and training as required. Also, as a general rule some of the more capable tools require you to dust off your wallet to enable the “advanced capabilities”.

Open source, doesn’t that mean I am in a major pickle (or worse) if something goes wrong?

If something is not going well with your shiny new real-time, big data, analytics solution, CDP can help. Additionally, in most cases open source tools have scalable paid subscription based support options. This means the quality of support can be tailored to the criticality of the solution.

So where does this all live?

Where you want, local, in the cloud or hybrid. CDP’s dockable containers can be spun up quickly in AWS just as easy as locally.

In summary Open Source is the “real thing”, it’s fast moving and innovative. It has been built to solve real business problems by big players who have successfully built their businesses on it.