First Look – Talend

Talend has been around for about 6 years and the original focus was on “democratizing” data integration – making it cheaper, easier, quicker and less maintenance-heavy. They originally wanted to build an open source alternative for data integration. In particular they wanted to make sure that there was a product that worked for smaller companies and smaller projects, not just for large data warehouse efforts.

Talend has 400 employees in 8 countries and 2,500 paying customers for their Enterprise product. Talend uses an “open core” philosophy where the core product is open source and the enterprise version wraps around this as a paid product. They have expanded from pure data integration into a broader platform with data quality and MDM and a year ago they acquired an open source ESB vendor and earlier this year released a Talend branded version of this ESB.

Talend 5 is a “holistic integration platform” with a newly announced OEM of BonitaSoft (they were already using the workflow capabilities of BonitaSoft in their MDM product). Talend 5 now embeds the complete Boniasoft product. This gives them data integration (historical core), process integration (BonitaSoft) and application integration (ESB)

There are 5 elements to the core Talend platform

• Common design environment across all three elements, including the BonitaSoft elements being OEMed
• Shared project repository for artifacts and metadata
• Single deployment approach
• Single runtime environment
• Single monitoring and management platform

A single platform really helps with projects that combine multiple elements (data integration and BPM say) – Talend try to make it easy for organizations to adopt additional elements by reducing the learning curve through common tooling etc.  Nevertheless Talend remains committed to providing best of breed elements in each case. The product supports the increasing array of cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments with particularly strong support for hybrid clouds. They support “Big Data” quality and integration tools that run inside Hadoop and allow companies to handle this data the same way they would handle data stored elsewhere. They also embed the JBoss Rules engine and JBoss Guvnor for rule management. This obviously allows for both simple business rules on the integration and data quality side and more complex embedded decision-making.

Good decision-making relies on data being delivered to the point of decision. An approach to data integration that focuses on the use of data for a specific solution while allowing a broad-based, coherent integration architecture to be developed incrementally feels like the right approach to data integration in a decision management context.