Talend Updates Data Management Software

April 20, 2010 Alex Woodie

Talend recently unveiled a major update to its collection of data management software. With version 4 of its eponymous suite, Talend is delivering what it claims is the industry’s first integrated platform that unites data integration, data quality, and master data management (MDM) capabilities under a single product.

Talend got its start seven years ago developing extract, transform, and load (ETL) software that it distributed under an open source license. The goal of its two founders, Bertrand Diard and Fabrice Bonan, was to do for ETL tools what JBoss , MySQL, and SugarCRM were doing for Web application middleware, databases, and CRM software, respectively.

The company generated some excitement, and people started downloading the free ETL tools. At one point, Talend partnered with two IBM business partners in Southern California, Key Information Systems and Systech USA, to develop an out-of-the-box business intelligence product based that bundled Talend’s ETL software with DB2 Web Query software from IBM and a System i server.

Over the years, the company has expanded its development goals beyond the core ETL element to related disciplines like data modeling, data mapping, a job modeler, and a metadata manager. Earlier this year, the company–which makes money by selling enterprise versions of its software and providing maintenance and services–introduced Talend MDM, which it billed as the first enterprise-strength master data management utility distributed under an open source license.

With this month’s release of Talend 4.0, the company is once again talking firsts. Specifically, by including the Talend MDM component that shipped earlier in the year, the company says it has the first data management platform that combines three critical functionalities, including data integration, data quality, and MDM capabilities, within a single offering.

This unified approach brings customers benefits, Talend says. Because users don’t have to learn other products and interfaces, they can get up-to-speed quicker on the Talend software, which integrates into the Eclipse IDE. Also, since all of Talend’s products access a single common metadata repository, users don’t have to worry about data incompatibilities when shifting between different products. Deployment is also streamlined, as are monitoring and maintenance.

“By unifying our core solutions in a single platform, we are empowering our customers to consolidate disparate projects and reinvent how they conduct data management in a way that is simply not possible with any other solution on the market,” states Fabrice Bonan, co-founder and chief operating officer for the Los Altos, California, company.

All of the Talend 4.0 products are available now. This includes the three products, Talend Open Studio, Talend Open Profiler and Talend MDM Community Edition, which are distributed for free via the GPL open source license, and the three enterprise-level products, Talend Integration Suite, Talend Data Quality, and Talend MDM Enterprise Edition, that are provided under a for-fee subscription license. For more information, visit www.talend.com.