Talend Helps British Housing Authority Integrate Windows and i5/OS Data

September 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

The Accent Group, a British association that provides housing to more than 50,000 residents, is successfully using Talend‘s open-source tools to solve data integration issues stemming from its use of disparate iSeries and Windows servers, Talend announced last week.

The Accent Group is a registered social landlord that provides nearly 20,000 homes across the UK through its three registered social landlords, called Accent Foundation, Accent Nene, and Accent Peerless.

The organization, which is based in Shipley, West Yorkshire, relies on a mix of IBM iSeries and Windows servers to keep track of business and to meet regulatory obligations. However, the use of different systems and data warehousing platforms has caused its share of headaches for the group, which funds a standing data integration project to deal with the differences in data types and their underlying incompatibilities.

Before implementing the Talend Integration Suite, it would take up to a month to create reports required by the Tenant Services Authority and the National Register of Social Housing, says Francois Mero, general manager of Talend’s EMEA business unit.

Following the implementation of the product–commonly referred to as an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool–the same work could be completed in a day. That has made the job of Andy Gowdy, Accent’s legacy system manager, much easier.

“Talend Integration Suite will provide Accent Group with one common tool for managing its variety of disparate systems, such as its anti-social management system, or its rent collection application,” Gowdy states in a press release.

A major selling point for Accent was that Talend is open source, “meaning that it can integrate with our IBM iSeries legacy systems and different platforms,” Gowdy says. “It can also extract data from any file format and at a dramatically lower cost than proprietary software.”

Talend–which develops core ETL functionality using the open source method but also sells licensees to higher-end versions of the software, as well as services–introduced support for i5/OS about two years ago. Since then, the software has been deployed in a handful of i OS shops.

Talend’s product also provides ETL functionality for the Smart i, a pre-packaged business intelligence bundle based on IBM‘s DB2 Web Query software, and put together by Key Information Systems and Systech.