This year we picked five startups commercializing open source projects that look especially strong going into 2012. The list is in no particular order.

Talend develops an open source data integration platform and offers a number of paid open core enterprise products and services.

Talend started as a pure-play vendor offering data integration software. It was founded in France by Bertrand Diard and Fabrice Bonan, who had previously worked as systems integrators. They saw the costs of integration, deployment and maintenance of enterprise software and thought it was time for an open source alternative.

The company soon expanded into data management and started offering data quality and other features. Late last year the company closed a new round of funding and acquired Sopera, an application integration company. That acquisition led to the release of Unified Integration Platform this year.

Last month the company released Talend v5, which adds business process management (BPM) to the mix through a partnership with Bonitasoft.

VP of marketing Yves de Montcheuil sees companies like Informatica and other proprietary integration vendors as Talend’s main competition. When asked about SnapLogic de Montcheuil notes that SnapLogic is mostly focused on cloud-to-cloud integrations, while Talend is focused on cloud-to-on-premise integrations, though Talend can be used for cloud-to-cloud integrations as well. Talend is available on-premises or in the cloud.

The company is growing steadily, with 400 employees and over 3,000 paying customers. And over 1 million people use the open source version de Montcheuil says. In addition to Bonitasoft, Talend has partnerships with Cloudera and with EMC to integrate its MapR-based Hadoop solution with other software.

The explosion of data and the proliferation of cloud apps (driven in part by mobility) should only increase the demand for data integration, application integration and data quality. Talend is a real leader here. The company could be a good IPO candidate, or the target of an acquisition by a larger integration services company.

More Open Source Startups to Watch

Puppet Labs

Revolution Analytics

Joyent

Opscode