Talend, an open source data integration software maker, unveiled a new service-based software product Monday, Talend On Demand, a service (SaaS) version of the company's Talend Open Studio product.

[ Talend   is one of the featured startups in InfoWorld’s Month of Enterprise Startups feature. ]

The new product allows customers to share Web-based metadata repositories with remote offices and business partners who might be scattered across the globe. The hosted repositories, which are managed and hosted by Talend, enjoy the benefits of the Open Studio data integration software but offload management, configuration and maintenance of repositories, said Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing at Talend.

Repositories hold a variety of information that is used by Open Studio. For example, metadata repositories might store application descriptions and data types, descriptions of jobs, project documents, and business models as well as data mappings, functions, and reusable code necessary to do data transformation, de Montcheuil said.

The kinds of data held in the metadata repositories tends to be small and easily transported via HTTP and SSL to the customer's Open Studio application, de Montcheuil said.

Customer data is not hosted remotely but rather remains on the customer's network. That differentiates Talend's SaaS offering from hosted data integration solutions by established data integration vendors like Informatica, de Montcheuil said.

Talend is a two-year-old startup based in Paris. The company's Open Studio product is an open source ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) data integration tool that was first released at the end of 2006. Since then, the free software has been downloaded more than 75,000 times, and attracted a community of around 500 open source developers contributing connectors to leading commercial and open source products and 1,000 beta testers to refine the company's releases, de Montcheuil said.

On Demand was created to satisfy the needs of Talend's large and small customers that didn't want to have to deploy and maintain a local metadata repository, de Montcheuil said. The SaaS model also makes it easier for geographically dispersed project teams to coordinate and reuse code, he said.

Smaller firms don't have to worry about the headache of deploying and configuring a server or servers for the repository, whereas larger customers that want to share a repository across their organization have an easy way to do so.

"It has appeal across the board," de Montcheuil said.

Talend is partnering with a leading European hosting company in France to manage the hosting operations, although de Montcheuil declined to name the firm.

Customers who wish to set up a hosted repository simply need to sign up on the Talend Web site. Instructions on configuring administrative permissions for the online repository will be sent in an e-mail, he said.

Talend On Demand is free for as many as two users. After that, customers will pay $99 a month for a three-user license. De Montcheuil didn't have pricing available for larger packages of licenses.