Talend Data Integration
Talend was founded in 2005 and now has a total of ten offices in nine countries. Currently, the company has over 1,600 employees and has grown by 6 percent in the last year. Its 6,500 customers worldwide come mainly from five industries: financial services, healthcare, government, retail and communication. An established partner network comprises 176 partners, which are divided into resellers (116), consulting (74) and systems integrators (83), 13 of them specifically for data governance. Talend is funded by venture capital.
Talend’s mission is to help organizations to create complete, trusted and uncompromised data. The company focuses mainly on the areas of data integration and integrity, combined with data governance in a single platform, Talend Data Fabric, which is supported by a partner ecosystem and service infrastructure.
Talend Data Fabric is a product name and should not necessarily be equated with the data fabric architecture paradigm. It is structured across the areas of data integration; data integrity and governance; and application and API integration. Data intelligence capabilities are part of the data integrity and governance area, enabling business users to find, understand, trust and prepare data. This part of the offering consists of data catalog, data stewardship, data inventory and data preparation modules as well as Talend Trust Score, which automatically rates overall data health. This document mainly focuses on Talend Data Integration as part of the Talend Data Fabric platform.
Talend is more geared towards technical users, although the UI directly supports data preparation and governance tasks by tech-savvy business users. It can be deployed on-premises, or in private or public cloud environments covering mid-sized to large scenarios.
Talend provides solid data integration and data quality functionality. There is also a strong focus on data quality to deliver a trusted data source with trust-building mechanisms such as Talend Trust Score. Its integrated modules and workflows help to hand over data and metadata between different components of the platform.
Talend lacks data profiling and data interaction functions, which would better involve business users and create interaction and feedback about metadata. Self-learning is another important weakness in the product.
In general, we consider Talend to be a stable vendor with a good strategy. With owners Thoma Bravo behind the scenes and a good data management offering, the company is well positioned for future success.
User & Use Cases
Talend is used by the majority of its customers for data warehousing/BI (88 percent) and data integration (88 percent), use cases that Talend has covered since day one. 38 percent use it for data preparation for business users. A lot of functionality has been added to support business users directly (e.g., data stewardship and data preparation capabilities). 25 percent also use it for data pipelining, data warehouse automation and/or master/reference data management. Surprisingly, given the name of the platform, only 6 percent claim to use it for data fabric and nobody uses it as a holistic data platform.
The software is used in companies of all sizes, but mainly in medium-sized organizations. It seems that the tool is used more by data experts than data citizens based on the median figure of 4 users per installation. However, the mean of 38 indicates that there are also some larger installations out there. The median of 3 developers confirms the impression that Talend is mainly used by data experts and the mean also shows there are companies with many more developers. Just one third of respondents say that Talend is used company-wide and 10 percent only use it in one division.
Use cases
n=32
Extend of usage in the company
n=20
Total number of users per company
n=32
Total number of developers per company
n=20
Company size (number of employees)
n=32
Want to see the whole picture?
BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The Data Management Survey results based on feedback from Talend Data Integration users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
Contact us to purchase the Vendor Performance Summary- Register for a free sample Vendor Performance Summary download
- If you have any questions, feel free to contact us