What is Talend | Introduction to Talend ETL Tool

In today’s Big data and the cloud-centric world, it becomes very important for the organizations to harness their enterprise information. Talend is an open source software integration platform helps you in effortlessly turning this data into business insights.

What Is Talend?

Talend is an open source data integration platform. It provides various software and services for data integration, data management, enterprise application integration, data quality, cloud storage and Big Data. Talend first came into the market in 2005 as the first commercial open source software vendor of data integration software. In October 2006, Talend launched it’s very first product – Talend Open Studio which is currently known as Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. Since then, it has released a wide range of products which are used quite favorably in the market.

Talend is considered to be the next generation leader in the cloud and Big Data integration software. It helps companies in taking real-time decisions and become more data-driven. Using Talend, data becomes more accessible, its quality enhances and it can be moved quickly to the target systems. 

 For your ease of understanding I have listed down some of the intriguing features of Talend products:

• Faster Development and Deployment: Talend automates tasks and further maintains them for you.
• Less Expense: Talend provides open source tools which can be downloaded free of cost. Moreover, as the processes speed up, the development costs reduce considerably.
• Future Proof:  Talend is comprised of everything that you might need to meet the marketing requirements today as well as in the future. So, it’s very less likely to go out of the market anytime soon.
• Unified Platform:   Talend meets all of our needs under a common foundation for the products based on the needs of the organization.
• Huge Community:  Being an open source software, it is backed up by a huge community. It is the preferred location for all Talend users and community members where they can share information, experiences, doubts, queries etc.

In the next section of this blog on what is Talend, we will take a look at the various products released by Talend.

Talend Products

Talend platforms

Talend Enterprise

Talend Open Studio

Among all these products, the most used products are Talend Open Studios, as they are available free of cost and anyone can download and use them easily.

Advantages Of Talend

Let me now list down few of the advantages of using Talend:

Now that, you know what is Talend and what are its advantages, let’s see how Talend helps out organizations in real life.

Real-Life Use Case

Industry:  Retail and E-Commerce

About:

Groupon is an American e-commerce marketplace, which connects subscribers with local merchants by offering various activities, travel, goods, and services in 15 countries worldwide. By March 2015, it was already serving around 48.1 million active customers and featured in more than 425,000 active deals globally in 48 countries. Groupon’s business model has reformed the companies’ way of reaching out to new customers. Irrespective of the reasons, Groupon reaches out to more people, that too more directly and quickly compared to any other medium.

Challenges: 

• The business activities of Groupon majorly rely upon its IT infrastructure. The exceptional growth of the company in a span of just a few years ended up in putting a considerable amount of pressure on its IT infrastructure.
• The enormous amount of data which is said to be the lifeline of Groupon became a huge challenge to deal with. On an average, the company had to process around one Terabyte of raw data every day, that too in real time.
• Moreover, they also had to store this processed information across various databases.

Where Talend Helped: 

Groupon uses Talend’s Data Integration products for importing the raw data from different sources to the data warehouse, then transforming it into the desired format and then exporting it to various target systems. 

How it actually works?

From over 30 countries, Groupon gathers the customer data, which is loaded into the data warehouse using the Talend integration platform. Groupon handles millions of transactions per day with the help of an OLTP solution which runs on a PostgreSQL database. The Talend platform then replicates data from the OLTP system to the Teradata warehouse after every 5 minutes interval. Along with this, the customer data is also loaded from different data sources to the Salesforce CRM solution. On an hourly basis, this data is further synchronized with the data warehouse in order to ensure that Groupon always has a single source of truth. 

So, the ultimate objective of the Talend integration platform is to import data from various sources like CRM, e-mail marketing, and OLTP systems, and move it to the data warehouse as swiftly as possible. This aggregated data is then made available to the sales team to support strategic decisions.

Result:

• 1 TB of raw data is being processed in real time and stored in various target systems every day
• 1,000 data integration jobs are executed on a daily basis using ETL processes
• In every 5 minutes , Talend updates the data warehouse with the OLTP system data

“With Talend, we analyze 1 terabyte of customer data in real time which helps us identify
trends as they emerge.”

-Rafael Herrera, Head of BI International, Groupon GmbH

This brings us to the end of this blog on what is Talend. I tried my best to keep the content short yet informative. Hope you enjoyed reading it.

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