California-headquartered Talend, a global leader in cloud and big data integration software, was best known as a underdog in the big data world. Riding high on the data integration space, Talend has a bunch of solutions that are mapped to the big data market. Over the years, the company has also cornered a big share in the data integration (DI) market.
There a couple of factors that have led to the rise of data integration. The last few years have seen an unprecedented growth in data volumes and there’s been an increasing number of data sources such as unstructured data, sensor data, social media data that enterprises are now harnessing for competitive advantage. But, organizations are not able to fully use all the data, thereby handling all this data effectively requires new data integration techniques. and Hadoop is no longer the data integration tool it was once meant to be.
In an exclusive interview with Talend CEO Mike Tuchen talks about the Talend Data Fabric – the unified platform that combines all integration products into a common set of powerful, easy-to-use tools for any integration style: real-time or batch, big data or master data management, on-premises or in the cloud. Solutions apart, another key talking point is Talend unveiling its new in Bangalore, as part of the overall international expansion strategy and better serve global client base. Talend’s customer base ranges from French MNC Capgemini to GE Healthcare and high end fashion chain Aldo among others. Talking about India, Tuchen stressed how the “country is a vital base to accelerate training and expand SI base”.
Here’s the full interview with the Talend CEO
1. Tell us about Talend’s market expansion plans in India and how is the Bangalore office poised to capitalize on growth?
Talend’s new office in Bangalore is a natural and important part of our overall international expansion strategy. This growth is being driven by the digital transition and broad need for companies across the globe and in every industry to become more data driven and use data effectively to improve every aspect of business – from customer engagement to operational efficiency. Our office in India will help Talend not only seize regional sales opportunities with large enterprises and public organizations but also better serve our global client base, including those with significant development hubs in India.
2. Could you tell us why India is a significant market for Talend and its big SI partners? Any plans afoot for expanding SI partner base?
Broadly, Talend’s partner program is focused on developing meaningful relationships with key Systems Integrators, Value Added Resellers, and Technical Partners. Companies that match our success profile and are willing to invest in building their Talend skills we are designating Premier Partners. We have selected four Global SI’s as premier partners; Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, and Wipro. Given the names on this list, India is a vital base to help deepen our relationships and accelerate the training of their associates, including local talent in India, on Talend solutions. While we will continue to expand our SI base, our focus will be to mature of relationship with our premier partners to attract new clients, and support and serve existing customers.
3.Can you tell us about Talend’s new Data Fabric platform for Enterprise-Scale Self-Service and how it automates the data cleansing process?
Talend Data Fabric is the unified platform that combines all our integration products into a common set of powerful, easy-to-use tools for any integration style: real-time or batch, big data or master data management, on-premises or in the cloud. In our latest release, Summer ’17, we added new self-service data management applications to help companies facilitate and accelerate their digital transformation.
One of the goals with the inclusion of Data Preparation and Stewardship capabilities was to break the IT bottleneck that’s been created because of the increase in the amount of available data and the interest throughout the organization for data-driven insight. IT is struggling to meet the data needs of the business, and as a result, data analysts are spending up to 80% of their time cleaning data. This situation makes it even harder for IT to enforce data governance policies. Talend Data Preparation addresses these challenges by combining intuitive self-service data preparation and enterprise-class data integration to transform how IT, data analysts, and business users can collaborate on cleansing and turning big data into insight.
4. Can you elaborate on enterprise support for data preparation?
Talend Data Preparation solution is all about ensuring how data can pass as efficiently as possible through the enterprise and be converted it into high quality “trusted” insight using business users who understand the data the best. It’s about providing this broader data access, while also maintaining steady control over the data. The core of the application is a browser-based, point-and-click tool offering smart guides and visual tools to help anyone quickly understand data attributes and quality status. Results can easily be exported into desktop tools such as Tableau and Excel, enabling immediate decision-making. To ensure data is never at risk, Talend Data Preparation offers role-based access and masking rules to control the use of data.
5. Can you tell us how the Talend Data Preparation app uses machine learning?
Talend uses machine learning to bring efficiencies to the process of data quality in the area of data matching. Traditionally, data matching has been an IT task wherein analysts would study the data, in order to profile (understand patterns) and standardize it (establish rules for how the data should look). These activities were manual and therefore time-consuming and subject to errors — organizations might take months to define and fine-tune matching rules.
Talend is using machine learning to help accelerate the matching process and make it more accurate. With Talend, the machine learning model learns and predicts matches. After the initial manual work to setup the profiles, machine learning models can start learning from the new data that is being submitted for standardization. The more data supplied to the model, the better Talend’s machine learning algorithm can perform and deliver accurate results and is therefore also far more scalable than traditional approaches.
6. Big data and cloud has become the biggest driver of growth for Talend. Can you tell us how the company is making a push in public cloud computing and some of the major disruptions in cloud marketplace?
Our big data and cloud business have in fact been growing at over 100% for nine consecutive quarters now, so we are happy by the interest we are receiving in those areas and believe it has a lot to do with our technical leadership. Talend’s push to the cloud is really driven by our customers. The latest trend as it relates to the Cloud and data is the move to multi-cloud environments. In fact, according to IDC, more than 50 percent of IT organizations already utilize a multi-cloud approach, and another 20 percent have plans to implement [a multi-cloud strategy] within 12 months.
Given this momentum, our latest version of our Talend Data Fabric platform has been optimized to manage cloud, and multi-cloud enterprise IT environments and seamlessly manage information across the major cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudera Altus, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake platforms. For Talend, it’s about giving our customers the flexibility to choose the correct platform for their particular business need and switch as necessary. At its core, Talend Data Fabric is about giving companies the agility to develop data pipelines on any of the leading cloud platforms with peace of mind in knowing whatever they develop will be able to run on the latest cloud and open source innovations.
7. Give us an insight into the size of India team and are there any plans to shore up hiring?
We are still brand new to the region but have hired our first 16 employees in a number of different roles in customer success, professional services, and sales and marketing. Talend is also actively hiring many more positions and anticipating closing the year with approximately 25 team members. Again, we are thrilled to have established our new presence in India, which will continue to grow in the future. Our office in Bangalore is an important part of our overall global business strategy and will help us address three key opportunities:
- A new customer success hub that will help us more effectively serve Talend’s global customer base
- Local support for the development teams of some of our larger global customers and partners that are based in India
- New business based on the rapid digital transformation of the public and private sector in India
