The other night we were wondering what to eat – neither me nor my wife felt like cooking, so it was down to takeaway options. We thought about the usual suspects but then twitter helped us out. A local eatery called Chatsworth Kitchen on Chatsworth Road, Hackney, tweets its menus, and this one appealed:

Spicy Moroccan meatballs with lemon couscous and yoghurt, roast Sicilian vegetable with dill pilaff, banana pudding, raspberry trifle

So here is the thing- the menu only lists two items for main courses. But they both sound completely delicious, don’t they? I am a vegetarian, but my wife is very much not. Two items- and they fit us like a pair of gloves. And the desserts? Oh my gosh – yum! So I ran up the road to Chats Kitchen. I jokingly tweeted at the time I was at my local opinionated eatery. Sarah, the proprietor, looked at me with a well cocked eyebrow:

“You’re calling me opinonated?”

Well yes Sarah I explained, opinionated is a good thing. It improves the customer experience- too much choice doesn’t make dining any easier or more appealing. How many times have you been to a restaurant with a five page menu and struggled to pick anything out. I said in application development, Opinionated Software is a good thing. Ruby On Rails is the canonical example. Of course David Heinemeier Hansson is rather opinonated himself, and he built this into a software architecture for building web applications. Developers loved the freedom of not screwing around with config files. Class naming conventions and so on are standardised.

The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.

But being opinionated isn’t just about software development. Take Apple- which has to be the most opinionated company in the world, right now, when it comes to product design. Apple doesn’t do focus groups. Apple doesn’t options or too much customer choice. Very often fewer options improves the customer experience.

I was talking to Alistair Rennie, Lotus Software general manager last week, and I said Lotus success will be predicated on what you take out, not what you put in. Funnily enough he agreed with me – and confided that recently he had had to kill some work from an engineering team because the functionality was unnecessary. Lotus won’t break out by serving endless “customer requirements”, it will do so by focusing on user experience. Lotus needs to be more opinionated, like Chats Kitchen.

Now I know that Sarah is a marketing professional by trade, and this is her first food startup. She took the plunge. Arguably a complex menu would have been just too difficult. But here is the thing: Sarah made less choice a strategy. As I rambled on about application development, she just said:

“Oh I call that choice architecture”

Great phrase. I haven’t read Nudge yet, but I like the idea for sure. I was talking to another client Actuate yesterday, and they have been finding that newer customers have been using BIRT open source analysis tools to focus on user experience without recourse to focus groups, and long requirements cycles. Instead these firms are opionionated, and are choosing open source software to package up great user experiences.

Of course choice architectures can go too far- I find Apple’s Permission-based Web a little stale. Or take the look and feel of Facebook, another walled garden. Totally opionated. We can all learn from opionated business. These are the options, their aren’t too many of them- we’ll be more productive working together than spending time wondering what choices to make.

Whether you’re a product manager, a designer, developer or General Manager less is more. Freedom doesn’t mean more options, it means more flow.

RedMonk itself tries to keep things opinonated with our Simple Subscription Service for Startups. You see- little companies don’t have time to screw around negotiating with a A La Carte, or a buffet – they just want a good offering at a good price. Too much choice is so last century.

If you enjoyed this post I suspect you will also enjoy my last riff based on a small business chalkboard – On Soup, Microcopy and User Experience.

Talend is a French outfit looking to shake up the expensive, largely proprietary world of data integration and analysis with a coherent suite of tools and with a MySQL-like dual licensing strategy. I caught up with VP of Marketing Yves de Montcheuil earlier this week. The really big question is- are enterprises ready for open source data management tools, which spurred an interesting conversation over at Andreas Bitterer’s Gartner blog after Yves accused the analyst leviathan of being overly conservative.

But I don’t need to rehash those arguments. What struck me clearly is that Talend has a solid momentum story, and in this economy pretty much every software license should be reassessed in light of open source alternatives.

• Talend claims 3.3m downloads. So what?
• More interestingly it claims 200k active users, as measured by activities on forums, for example, and downloads of user documentation. Meh.
• The most interesting number – is that Talend has 400 paying customers. That’s a pretty good number for any enterprise start up.

35% of paying customers are Fortune 500 organisations including eBay, Yahoo and Virgin Mobile. Yes there is clearly a bias to web companies in that number, but eBay for example, is a massive Oracle shop –its hardly OSS uber alles.

Another really interesting stat, one that surprised floored me -  55% of its implementations are in operational data stores, rather than ETL.  Its one thing to use OSS to clean your data up, its quite another to rely on it in production. Or is it? One thing I know for certain is that Talend and Bitterer would both agree different categories in data integration have been different for too long.

Another guy that knows a thing or two about data integration and building a company is Bernard Liautaud. Who he? Oh just the guy that founded Business Objects- which SAP acquired in 2007 for $6.8bn, somewhere near the top of the market. Nice exit! Bernard is now managing partner at a little VC company called Balderton, which is funding Talend. Balderton funded Bebo, Betfair and Setanta, so it has a pretty solid record of supporting early stage European businesses.

So what comes next?

Yves says growth- the firm now has sites across Europe [the briefing was ostensibly about the new UK office]. Talend expects revenues to double or triple this year, but of course that’s off a fairly small base.

Like MySQL Talend has an enterprise version of its tools which includes extra goodies not available to the community edition, such as tools for monitoring jobs, or a new data profiling tool.

Why the UK now? Mostly because post Blair the UK is waking up to open source economics, finally catching up with France and Germany in terms of government imprimatur.

“Things have changed, says Monteuil, “Large corporations were “looking down at open source with a sympathetic eye “but its not ready for us”. But now CIOs see it as a full component.” What he said…

Before wrapping up, there was one other data point I found very interesting. The company’s localisation and multi-language strategy is based on crowd sourcing through Talend Babili. Open source beats the hell out of proprietary on multi-language support – see OpenOffice, for example, which supports languages that Microsoft Office doesn’t, such as Basque. So the community may not be contributing code, but its creating really useful documentation.

Another area the community has helped is in providing connectors (Talend now has more than 400). But when customers asked for SAP integration Talend stepped up to the work. Sensible in Europe, good use of capital.

All in all Talend seems in pretty good shape to go after organisations looking to cut costs in the recession. Open Studio is a solid piece of work.

disclosure: Talend is not a customer. Neither currently is SAP.

I recently participated in a podcast about open source data services infrastructure, sponsored by RedMonk client WS02 (which I have written about previously here and here).

The show was moderated by Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions. He’s a good chap. Other participants are WSO2′s CTO Paul Fremantle and Brad Svee, the IT manager of development at travel management company Concur Technologies.

WS02 is a very cool outfit. They are writing a lot of open source code in double quick time, and I don’t know of many other development shops in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Good people.

amazing picture courtesy of hashmil and CreativeCommons Attribution 2.0 license.