Talend Looks To Move To High-Level ‘Data Health’ Capabilities With New Release

With the fall edition of the Talend Data Fabric platform, the big data company is focused on going beyond moving and correcting data to helping customers improve the trustworthiness of their information assets.

Big data tech developer Talend this week debuted a new release of its Talend Data Fabric platform with capabilities the company says go beyond core data integration and data quality into higher levels of “data health” management.

The Talend Fall ’21 release, unveiled at the company’s Talend Connect 2021 customer conference, includes unlimited pricing for its Stitch ETL tool, a new native trust score capability for Snowflake data, and new self-service Data API sharing abilities.

The company also launched Talend Data Quality Service, which offers both data quality technology and professional services, to help customers establish and run data quality programs.

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“Our focus with Fall ’21 is basically to strengthen our platform and start building the platform of the future, while also delivering value immediately to the data professionals that know and love Talend,” said Jamie Fiorda, Talend product marketing vice president, in an interview with CRN.

“The integration solutions of the past are not designed for the challenges of the future,” Fiorda added.

Talend, based in Redwood City, Calif., is one of the leading suppliers of tools for data management including data integration and ETL (extract, transform and load), data governance and compliance, data quality management and more.

But basic data integration and data quality functions are becoming “more and more commoditized,” when what businesses and organizations need today – especially for digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives, are higher-level capabilities and services to improve “data health,” said Rolf Heimes, Talend global business development vice president and channel chief, in the interview.

Basic data integration and quality tools “don’t solve the problem of how to improve the trustworthiness of the data,” Heimes said. “How do I support my company’s data strategy from an organizational perspective?”

Heimes said a recent Talend survey found that 78 percent of executives have challenges making data-driven decisions and 60 percent don’t always trust the data they use.

Talend is also positioning the capabilities of Talend Fall ’21 as an opportunity for its systems integrator and reseller partners to offer higher level data solutions and services. “We’re steering our channel more into this direction of data health,” Heimes said.

“We’re viewing ourselves as being part of a [data health] value proposition with our partners that we can deliver for the overall need of our customers,” Fiorda added.

Talend’s efforts to broaden its capabilities come as the data management market becomes increasingly crowded with long-time players such as Informatica – which just went public last week – to a number of well-funded startups such as Matillion and Fivetran.

Talend, which was previously a public company, was just acquired in September by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in a $2.4 billion deal announced earlier this year.

“Being private again allows us to kind of step away from the quarterly pressures and focus more on innovation with more investment and more expertise and focus,” Fiorda said. “Our customers are ultimately going to benefit from this in a great way.”

Talend reported revenue of $287.5 million in 2020, its last year as a public company. Fiorda disclosed that in the first half of 2021 Talend’s annual recurring revenue reached $308 million and cloud ARR was up 17 percent to $135 million.

Talend Fall ’21 includes Stitch Unlimited, a non-consumption-based pricing model for using Stitch, the company’s self-service data loading software that Talend acquired in 2018.

Before now customers paid by data rows per month. Talend says the new pricing plan has no limits on data volumes or the number of users, jobs or connectors. “We think consumption-based pricing is essentially a kind of tax on businesses,” Fiorda said.

The new Talend Data Quality Service is a combination of data quality technologies delivered managed service and data quality experts designed to help customers develop and run a data quality program. Heimes doesn’t see the service competing with services offered by channel partners and said partners can even take advantage of the expertise.

The new Native Trust Score for Snowflake service generates an automated “trust score” for datasets in a customer’s data warehouse running on the Snowflake data cloud platform. Trust scores are based on such metrics as data completeness, validity, discoverability, usage and popularity, according to Talend.

Improvements to the Talend Data Fabric platform itself include a new self-service data API sharing feature, part of Talend Data Inventory, which gives non-technical users the ability to create REST APIs for data sharing and self-serve analytics. Also new are enhancements to Talend Studio 8, Talend Data Catalog 8 and Data Quality Rules Designer.