#17 - November 2009

A word from Talend’s VP of Strategy & Business Development

Managing the Complete Data Lifecycle

Companies are becoming more careful with their data and now regard it as a strategic resource. Whatever their size, they seek to develop a “single version of truth” to obtain a reliable and unified view of their customers, partners, employees, and others. However, even today most companies operate diverse portfolios with fragmented data that is often inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent, residing in various application silos. Master Data Management (MDM) offers an effective means of linking all data to a to an enterprise repository for easy management.

Unfortunately, this technology is out of reach for most companies – analysts are citing a $1 million price tag for a single implementation and five times more for associated services. By entering the MDM market, Talend has added another string to its bow, completing an offer previously focused on integration and data quality. The acquisition of the MDM assets of Amalto Technology will differentiate us from most of the traditional players in data integration while, at the same time, responds to a recurring motif we hear from customers who want a complete and integrated management of the data lifecycle.

This announcement comes just as the evangelization phase of the market is ending. Today companies want simpler and more economical solutions. Analysts currently value the global MDM market at $5 billion.

With this in mind, we decided against developing our own in-house MDM solution, preferring to save valuable time and mitigate risk by acquiring an existing technology which would allow us to focus our efforts on our data integration solutions.

The technology we acquired from Amalto is very flexible and easy to implement and is based on the same technology as our own solutions (Eclipse) as well as industry standards (XSD, Ajax, XML, etc.). It’s more universal and applies to the management of all types of reference data. Finally, it has already gained visibility among technology analysts.

Talend is planning to open source the technology by early 2010, offering it as an open source solution – scalable and customizable – an enterprise version for large projects. And, with the help of our community and our partners, we will develop industry-specific models that will accelerate its implementation. This collaboration should help us quickly cover all bases, as we have previously done with our data integration solutions.

Jean-Luc Solans
Vice President, Strategy & Business Development
Talend