Talend 5.6 Takes World By Storm In New Big Data Software Release

Data integration software developer Talend is set to debut the commercial version of its flagship Talend 5.6 release in December, offering previews of code for leveraging the Apache Spark and Apache Storm open-source technologies that boost Hadoop performance.

The new edition also provides new master data management (MDM) capabilities, broader Internet of Things (IoT) device connectivity, and improved data productivity and profiling performance.

Talend began offering the open-source community version of the software earlier this month.

[Related: MapR Hadoop Gets Blessing From Data Warehouse Giant Teradata]

In addition, Talend is set to expand its channel efforts, according to chief marketing officer Ashley Stirrup. The company currently works with systems integrators and solution providers -- Stirrup said a minimum of 40 percent of Talend's sales today have a partner involved.

Meanwhile, Talend is launching a formal VAR/reseller program in Europe and has already enlisted about a dozen partners in the company's native France, as well as in the U.K., Germany and Belgium. "We're looking for that to be a big-growth revenue stream for us in 2015," Stirrup said, adding that the European program will serve as a template to expand the company's channel sales globally.

Apache Spark is a powerful in-memory data-processing engine for the Hadoop big data platform that's getting a lot of attention. Some expect Spark to replace the MapReduce technology that's at the core of most Hadoop implementations today. Apache Storm is a distributed realtime computational system that brings realtime data processing capabilities to Hadoop.

With the added Spark support, Talend 5.6 can speed up massive batch-analysis jobs, interactive queries and graph processing, while the Storm component will improve the analysis of streaming information.

Spark "is taking the world by storm," said Joe Caserta, president of Caserta Concepts, a New York-based solution provider that works with Talend's technology as part of the data warehouse, data analytics and business intelligence services it provides for customers. With the Spark support in the 5.6 release, Caserta said he can begin to implement Spark in production environments.

On the IoT front, Talend 5.6 includes the MQTT and AMQP protocols that allow sensor and device data to be collected and processed with a company's realtime data workflows. "Talend now works with that natively," Caserta said approvingly.

Caserta has worked with Talend for at least five years, noting that the company's open-source approach "was very, very cost-competitive. That was a big win to save our customers some money. And they were pretty innovative."

Talend 5.6's new master data management functionality that makes data model changes easier, cutting in half the time needed to update master data models, according to the company, and doubling data-cleansing speeds.

The new release also adds support for Oracle GoldenGate CDC and Microsoft HDInsight, and enhanced connectivity for Salesforce.com, Marketo and NetSuite applications.

PUBLISHED NOV. 26, 2014