These days, it’s nigh impossible to find anyone who can talk about the future of IT without carrying on about the cloud — and with good reason, since cloud computing is certainly important. But Talend is betting enough data will stay local for customers to demand a mixed strategy for a long time to come. At least, that’s what version 5 of the company’s open source platform released in November 2011 suggests. Here’s the scoop:

In an ideal world, we probably would do everything in the cloud. It’s more centralized, more reliable and, when done properly, more secure. Yet backwards-compatibility requirements and the legacy applications on which organizations in the real world will continue to rely for the foreseeable future mean that moving everything to the cloud is rarely realistic. It will be a long, long time before most IT infrastructures have migrated every last bit of their data to the cloud.

Talend v5 and the Cloud

Talend, the open source data management company, appears to recognize the importance of legacy infrastructure despite all the cloud hype we’ve been barraged with over the last couple years. As Talend VP of Marketing Yves de Montcheuil said in an interview, “All organizations have a mixed strategy today. No one does everything in the cloud.”

With the release of the latest version of its main product, Talend v5, the company is positioning itself to seize on the need of organizations for mixed data solutions that integrate local resources with those in both public and private clouds.

Talend is promoting version 5 of its software as a”holistic approach to integration” that will allow IT organizations …

In more concrete terms, the product includes features such as the ability to generate native Hadoop code to work with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) data more seamlessly. In addition, Talend v5 promises unified interfaces for managing and extracting data no matter where on the infrastructure it lives, locally or in the cloud.

Accompanying the software update is an OEM partnership between Talend and BonitaSoft to deliver a new business management product, Talend Enterprise BPM, which will debut as part of the Talend v5 platform. Thus Talend is focused not only on expanding the feature set of its existing products but also expanding into new niches.

And as shown by the partnership with BonitaSoft, which also delivers open source products, Talend remains heavily integrated in the open source channel as it grows. Talend v5, like preceding products, is being released via an “open core model,” with free versions available for download from the company’s website now and enterprise builds promised by the end of the year.