Telling IT consumers your latest product harkens back to the past may not seem like a great idea in a market where innovation and forward-thinking are prime. But that’s precisely what Talend is doing this week with the release of its latest open source data-integration software.  Curious?  Here’s the scoop.

As Talend Director of Product Marketing Jim Walker put it in a conversation earlier this week, the company’s latest moves have been informed heavily by the sense that, in the Big Data market, “Everything new is old again from Talend’s point of view.” What he meant, he explained, is that a new explosion in data-integration technology is currently in progress that recalls the one from the mid-2000s, when Talend got its start.

This isn’t to say that the past is simply being repeated — this time around, big data is bigger than ever, and the challenges associated with managing it have accordingly grown more and more complex — but the steady demand for a new generation of data integration tools is driving a whirlwind of innovation.

Talend Open Studio for Big Data

Talend’s latest effort to respond to these demands is the release of Talend Open Studio for Big Data. The full scoop on the product is available here, but highlights include:

Like past Talend products, Open Studio for Big Data will be available under an Apache license.

Hortonworks Partnership

Accompanying the new product announcement was news of a partnership between Talend and Hadoop vendor Hortonworks to integrate Talend Open Studio for Big Data into the Hortonworks platform.

This isn’t Talend’s first major collaboration — as an open source company, it already works closely with channel partners including Cloudera, Greenplum and Apache’s native Hadoop distribution — but the Hortonworks partnership introduces perhaps the most complete open source solution for Big Data management yet.

Where will Talend and the open source Big Data channel go from here?  Stay tuned as we continue to track the evolution.