Data management company Talend today announced that it has raised US$34 million in venture funding, and that it has acquired open-source application integration solution provider Sopera.

The acquisition will broaden Talend’s product offerings, as “data management and application integration are parallel spaces that are coming together quickly,” said Yves de Montcheuil, vice president of marketing for Talend. The open-source integration products are based on Apache’s projects ActiveMQ (for messaging and routing), Camel (for integration) and the CXF Web services framework.

A service bus, for example, is purely focused on application connectivity, providing messaging, routing and rules, but it’s not great for moving and transforming data, de Montcheuil said. The merger of products will result in an ESB that’s more powerful by giving it the ability to filter and enrich data as it moves it along, he explained.

Conversely, he added, Talend’s data integration technology will benefit from a real-time transport layer. “Having a unified environment with shared objects makes the environment more productive,” he said.

Looking ahead, Talend hopes to address the challenges of using middleware in the cloud, according to CEO Bertrand Diard. “When you build new applications in the cloud, you need to maintain connectivity between the cloud and on-premise” back ends, he said. “We think the open-source model is more flexible and scalable to help the cloud wave.”

The company will have a detailed product road map within the next month, according to Diard, adding that the Sopera acquisition is only the first step in the company’s quest to become the key pure-play open-source vendor in the market.

Silver Lake Sumeru, a private equity firm investing in middle-market technology companies, led this round of funding.