Integration is a big job made bigger by expensive software packages. Talend today released a set of Apache-based integration tools and an enterprise service bus designed to give developers powerful software at an open-source price point. Talend has pulled together Apache CXF, Apache Camel and its own open standards-based ESB.

Pat Walsh, vice president of marketing for Talend’s Application Integrations Division, said that his company adds value to the existing Apache projects by including a service locater and extensive data management integrations. “We differentiate ourselves by providing preconfigured packages that allow you to get started in popular environments,” he said.

“We provide documentation, and we have not only the contributors, but also the leaders of these Apache projects. The biggest differentiator is the integration with the data management products, which provides a unified platform. We have the same tool sets that are used in development, deployment and monitoring. Many open-source ESB vendors are pure play, or don’t have this component.”

For developers, Walsh said the additional capabilities added to these Apache projects will help with troubleshooting and service reuse and location. He said that the service locater allows developers to write integrations, deploy them, then come back to use them later without the need to rewrite or redeploy them when the environments have changed or grown.

Additionally, Walsh said that using Talend’s data management tools in conjunction with this new ESB will give developers an end-to-end path across which errors can be tracked down to root causes.

“You can do track and trace of services, and root source analysis of any errors you have. Then we added a security framework. We’re leveraging a lot of the tooling that has been inherently in place at Talend into the existing installed base of our users who are typically data management users,” said Walsh.

The community edition of the Talend ESB is available for free on Talend’s website. Commercial service and support is available for the full version.