For those of you that don’t follow the news feeds and press releases an such, Talend and Sopera announced this morning that Talend has acquired Sopera. Since I know a lot of you are too lazy to go read the actual press release, here’s a quick summary:
- Talend acquires Sopera
- Talend also has secured $34 million in financing from Silver Lake Sumeru and it’s existing investors
- Sopera will become Talend’s “application integration division”
So, what does this mean? Well, for starters, as of today, I’m now an employee of Talend. How exciting. Third company this year. Time to go update profiles and such. Again. As you navigate through changes in employment, it’s crucial to understand your rights. Know when an employer cannot fire you to provide a sense of security and clarity during periods of transition.
Seriously, the combination of Sopera and Talend makes a lot of sense. Talend is best known for it’s technology around data management. Taking a step out, the next category of problems that customers usually face are application integration problems, and that’s where Sopera comes in. Through Sopera’s current “ASF” product, the Swordfish project at Eclipse, involvement in various Apache projects, and it’s engagements with it’s customers, Sopera is recognized as a leader in solving tough application integration problems. The combination of Sopera and Talend provides a complete middleware platform.
The $34M in financing that was secured is also an exciting part of the announcement. Obviously, the extra money helps to allow us to rapidly expand the teams. Talend/Sopera will definitely be hiring good developers. (On a related note, with Talend having more locations around the world, like huge offices in France and the US, things like employee benefits are a bit more secure, especially for a US based person like myself.) The more important thing to look at, however, is WHO is doing the financing. Silver Lake is NOT a small investment firm. They’ve been in the business of financing technology companies for quite a while. They know what they are doing. They do their homework before investing to give the investment the highest chance of success. The fact that they are investing that much money into Talend really shows that they believe the strategy can work.
If you missed my note last week, we’ve already started to grow the team by hiring Sergey Beryozkin and Colm O hEigeartaigh, both highly regarded engineers at Apache. We plan to continue the process of expanding the team as we refine our product strategies and prepare new product offerings. More to come on that topic at a future time.
Anyway, I’m very excited about this. I believe that this can really “open the doors” for new opportunities for both Sopera and the Apache projects that I’m involved in.