Iona FUSEs Celtix and LogicBlaze

Iona says it is expanding customers' open SOA choices by bringing together under the FUSE banner products that were formerly part of Celtix ESB, or were acquired with the LogicBlaze purchase this April.

CBR points out that Iona seems to be favouring LogicBlaze supported components (Apache projects ActiveMQ, ServiceMix and Camel) over Celtix components (apart from CXF, which has moved over from ObjectWeb to Apache). The LogicBlaze purchase must be working out well, methinks...

Talend - another open source ETL tool

Bloor's Philip Howard writes at IT-Director about Talend Open Studio - unusual among ETL solutions in that it is a code generator (of Java, SQL, Perl) rather than an "engine" type of product.

As well as the usual drag-n-drop transformation GUI, this apparently supports business process modelling - which gives Talend a feature that many "real" ETL/EAI tools don't have. There's also support for using a server grid to parallelise processing, and there's an "on demand" SaaS offering.

Version 2.0 is now available, as well as a 2.1 release candidate which is said to add features including:

• further optimizations for performance increase
• support of new databases (including bulk load)
• transaction management (connection sharing, commit and rollback)
• Slowly Changing Dimensions support
• MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) support for real-time integration jobs
• fuzzy logic data matching (using the Levenshtein and metaphone algorithms)
• normalization, denormalization and flow merge
• support of SSH remote connections
• support of PGP file decryption (through GPG binary)
• reinforced support of the XML standard: DTD validation, XSD, XSLT transformation, significant improvements in hierarchical XML file generation, support of the XMLRPC Web Services protocol…
• improvements to the tMap component, to support input filters and new joins types such (the cartesian product, first match, last match…)

Sounds like it might be worth a closer look...

Could open source BI close out incumbents?

Bloor's Philip Howard writes in The Register that Jaspersoft 2.0 is now a serious threat to mainstream BI (and ETL) vendors; a full enterprise license for $35k will knock spots off most of the competition.

Perhaps that helps to explain why the fizz has gone out of Cognos's recent results.

And it doesn't help that according to a survey sponsored by Sybase and reported by CBR, only 13% of UK BI projects work as expected. So naturally "31% of firms surveyed, particularly small and medium sized businesses, [are] keeping an especially close eye on keeping costs down to a manageable level."

Open Source BI and ETL - picking up pace?

A couple of recent stories to ponder on: SnapLogic raises $2.5M (admittedly from its founder's very own VC boutique) to build its LAMP based data services, while according to CBR, Ingres is preparing a Jaspersoft based BI/ETL appliance.

Meanwhile Pentaho has released its Data Integration 2.5 (formerly known as Kettle) and is showing at ODTUG what it calls "the world's most popular open source BI suite".

Open source BI vendors get busy

A useful article from Computer Business Review. Has anyone got any experience with Pentaho or Jaspersoft data integration tools being used in anger that they'd like to share?