Interesting article in the Register last week. It appears that  Bernard Liautaud, founder of Business Objects has joined the board of an “Open Source” BI project, known as Talend. Mr. Liautaud left Business Objects last year.

Talend puts out a tool called “Open Studio” which is used for data integration. Even though this tool can be downloaded for free, people are expecting to make money providing services related to it.  Balderton Capital has given Talend $12 million in capital so someone must be expecting to make some money. It doesn’t hurt to have someone like BL on board.

And Talend isn’t alone in this market niche. There is another suite of open source BI tools called Pentaho which aims to compete with products like Business Objects Enterprise.  These products get better and pick up more customers and developers every year.  They will soon start to encroach on the proprietary products we think of as the market leaders.