The Weather Channel Predicts a Clear Future for Customer Data Integration

Talend‘s solutions Promotes Efficiency, Affordability, and Flexibility.

The Weather Channel has grown substantially since launching the first 24-hour cable television weather network in 1982. Today, the Atlanta-based company has expanded its media outlets to bring vital weather information to world viewers through Internet, wireless, interactive television, radio and social platforms. Well-known digital properties such as weather.com and The Weather Channel mobile applications use state-of-the-art technology to deliver the expertise of its more than 200 meteorologists, often in real time.

To manage the many customers and partners with whom it works, The Weather Channel runs several key back-end systems that facilitate its sales and advertising processes, such as order management and yield management. As one might imagine, a vast quantity of data flows through these systems—and as the company has grown, the ability to process and extract that data has become increasingly more complex.

“Everything we had in terms of ETL was just handwritten PERL scripts,” explains Ben Garrett, Director of Advertising Technology & Business Intelligence for The Weather Channel. “That’s very difficult to maintain, difficult to pass off from one person to the next. Someone had to sit down and physically read the code every time. They had to understand the code end to end before they could begin to contribute anything.”

According to Garrett, the resulting inefficiency had become unacceptable. With the continued success of The Weather Channel, its advertising, sales, and customer data steadily grew in volume. In addition, after the company had been acquired in 2008 by a consortium of NBC Universal and the private equity firms Bain Capital and The Blackstone Group, it was given a new directive: Consolidate operations for the TV and digital entities. These entities had, for many years, maintained their own separate IT and business systems. As part of its move toward consolidation, The Weather Channel wanted to replace its entire advertising service platform and unite its sales forces to provide a single view of the organization. And, because all of its data sources would then change, they also planned to replace the data warehouse.

Garrett and his team foresaw many months of effort involved in making the transitions. “As part of our analysis for switching out these products,” he says, “we needed to come up with a maintainable, long-term solution for mapping data. We needed to find a tool that would simplify data processing and make it easier for multiple people to work on data-related jobs. We needed something that would make our data movement and transformation processes reusable.”

The Weather Channel finds Talend Enterprise Data Integration a shelter from the storm

In late 2008, The Weather Channel began looking at solutions from both Business Objects and IBM’s Infosphere division. “However,” Garrett explains, “when we realized there were open source solutions available, we started heading that direction.” The company had developed its infrastructure on open source platforms, so open source was the natural and preferred fit, particularly when open source solutions cost far less than their proprietary counterparts.

Talend stuck out from the start as a strong contender, not only because of functionality but also because of the solution’s affordability and flexibility. “The people at Talend spoke to us in terms of pricing—which was a big selling point for us—and also in terms of being able to use and play around with the tool before we took the leap,” Garrett recalls.

His team downloaded Talend Open Studio to give the functionality a closer look. “Once we actually got to try it out, there was no turning back,” says Garrett.

The Weather Channel made the decision to upgrade to Talend Enterprise Data Integration when they realized they had found an ideal combination—a solution that was truly affordable and that let their developers share jobs much more efficiently.

Talend helps save time, improve data quality, and augment sales capabilities

Over the past three years, The Weather Channel has dramatically increased the efficiency of its data integration capabilities. Instead of wading slowly through handwritten script, developers now use Talend Enterprise Data Integration to quickly build visual ETL jobs and share their work during large migration projects—such as the company’s recent implementation of Salesforce.com, which has them pulling data from various order management systems and ad servers and then consolidating it into a new, unified sales view.

Using Talend’s solutions, The Weather Channel built a database that allowed developers to map advertisers from cable to business, convert them a single entity, and push the data to Salesforce.com. “One of the big benefits of Talend Enterprise Data Integration is its built-in connector to Salesforce.com,” Garrett says. Development teams were able to write code to automate the task of syncing manual data points between its systems. In other words, they can now use Talend to communicate directly between their different back-end database platforms and the new Salesforce.com system.
“We have five systems flowing data into Salesforce.com now, powering our business. All that flow is through Talend,” says Garrett. “That’s the beauty of this visual development tool. It’s helped accelerate our implementation while improving data quality. We also give our sales teams a much clearer picture of the entire organization, which enables them to better manage and serve customers.”

The Weather Channel expands Talend platform with solution for Master Data Management

During its migration to the new sales platform, Garrett’s team realized they were, in essence, taking a first stab at Master Data Management (MDM). With strategic data management initiatives becoming a major focus for the company, they decided to investigate Talend Enterprise MDM and ultimately selected the solution for its open-source platform and affordability. Extending its Talend solution platform also allows The Weather Channel to leverage the vast knowledge gained from using Talend Enterprise Data Integration.