The chief executive of open-source data integration software vendor Talend SA is stepping down and handing the reins to a veteran of SAP SE’s Concur Technologies Inc. subsidiary, who is also bringing two other executive-level colleagues with her.

Mike Tuchen (pictured, left), who joined Talend in 2013 and shepherded it through a successful initial public offering amid an IPO drought in 2016, said he made the decision to depart voluntarily after the company recruited Christal Bemont (right) from SAP Concur, where she was most recently chief revenue officer.

“When we started the CRO search, we were looking for someone who could have the trajectory to become a CEO,” Tuchen said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “When we found Christal, we realized we didn’t have to wait.”

Bemont is bringing her own support staff to the job in the form of Ann-Christel Graham, who was most recently vice president of enterprise sales at Concur, and Jamie Kiser, formerly Concur’s vice president of Global Services Operations. The two will become CRO and chief customer officer at Talend, respectively.

Bemont ended her 15-year career at Concur with responsibility for sales and marketing in a business spanning more than 90 countries that grew 25% annually during her tenure. She previously held sales and operational positions at Motorola Inc., Adexs Inc., Extensity Inc. and Clarify Inc.

Bemont said her interest in Talend grew out of her realization while at Concur that applications are “only as good as the data you put in. When I thought about where I’d spend the next stage in my career, I knew it was going to be all about the data.”

Tuchen exits as Talend is in the final stages of completing a near-total transition to the cloud. Founded as a seller of integration software for use in on-premises Hadoop big data environments, the company began shifting to a cloud-first strategy four years ago. In its most recently quarterly report, Talend said its cloud business now accounts for almost half its revenues and that cloud sales have more than doubled for 13 straight quarters.

But like many companies that have shifted to the cloud, the journey hasn’t been easy. In late 2018 Talend’s stock dropped 35% in one day on a weak forecast it blamed on softer-than-expected license sales. Although the stock is up 20%, to just over $42 per share, since its December 2018 nadir, it’s still well below the high of nearly $70 per share it reached in the fall of 2018.

Prior to that, Talend was a Wall Street tech darling. The 50% first day jump from its offering price on July 29, 2016, was widely credited with helping to reassure nervous tech companies that it was okay to test the public markets again. The stock rose steadily for two years, fueled by Tuchen’s conservative philosophy of limiting growth to what could be achieved while remaining cash flow-positive, before last year’s sell-off.

Recently, Tuchen said, he has added the duties of chief marketing officer and head of sales to his CEO role while the company looked to fill those positions. “That’s a lot,” he said. “When we saw the opportunity for someone to jump right in, I had mixed feelings, but the idea of taking some time off was appealing.” He plans to remain on Talend’s board for the next two years but said he has no immediate plans for an operational role at another company.

Bemont has no experience as a CEO but said her background overseeing product, marketing and some financial operations at Concur has prepared her for the rigors of Wall Street scrutiny. Talend, which is currently on a $250 million annual run rate, should look toward becoming a billion-dollar company, she said.

“One lesson learned at Concur is that you have to be architected from an early stage for the future,” she said. “It’s not just how to acquire customers quickly but how build a business that will be ready for growth.”

Photos: Talend