ThoughtSpot, Matillion partner to accelerate analytics
The analytics vendor and data integration vendor both offer cloud-native tools and have joined forces to reduce the time it takes go from data ingestion to insight and action.
ThoughtSpot on Tuesday unveiled a new partnership with Matillion aimed at reducing the time it takes users to ingest and integrate data so they can ultimately increase their speed to insight.
ThoughtSpot, founded in 2012 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., revealed the partnership during Snowflake Summit, the hybrid virtual and in-person conference hosted by data cloud vendor Snowflake.
ThoughtSpot is an analytics vendor that emphasizes speed and ease of use, and its peers include longstanding vendors such as Tableau and Qlik as well as newer vendors including Domo.
The vendor was one of the was one of the first to make natural language processing a central feature, enabling customers to search for data without having to know and write code. And in 2020, after initially designing its platform for on-premises users, ThoughtSpot redesigned its tools to make them cloud-native and has since emphasized the cloud where the greater compute power results in speed.
ThoughtSpot's platform, however, is limited to data exploration and analysis that results in insight and action.
It does not include data ingestion and integration capabilities. Customers, therefore, have to either develop their own extract, load and transform (ELT) capabilities or use another vendor's tools along with ThoughtSpot.
Matillion, founded in 2011 and based in Manchester, England, is a data integration specialist in a field that includes vendors such as Talend and Informatica. And like ThoughtSpot, Matillion offers no-code/low-code, cloud-native capabilities that aim for speed and ease of use.
A ThoughtSpot Data Workspace screenshot displays prebuilt applications for SaaS offerings that users can download and deploy without writing code.
A logical fit
With their shared philosophies and symbiotic platforms, the vendors make good partners, and the integration of their platforms is a natural fit that will benefit joint customers, according to Kuntal Vahalia, senior vice president of worldwide channel and alliances at ThoughtSpot.
The end goal is finding the most accelerated way for our customers to unlock data, consume data, generate insights and turn those into actions.
Kuntal VahaliaSenior vice president of worldwide channel and alliances, ThoughtSpot
"The end goal is finding the most accelerated way for our customers to unlock data, consume data, generate insights and turn those into actions," he said. "The key is 'accelerated.' We are the experience layer and can sit on top of any modern data stack, but what we needed was to get the data stack ready in the most frictionless way, and that's where Matillion comes in."
ThoughtSpot is able to connect to most cloud data warehouses and lakes, and its platform is compatible with data integration vendors in addition to Matillion, but the no-code design of Matillion's platform makes it particularly synergistic with ThoughtSpot.
"Their no-code platform really helps our customers get their data stack ready in the most accelerated fashion, and I don't think we had that before," Vahalia said. "This concept of speed-to-market, speed-to-value is what we're realizing with this partnership between ThoughtSpot and Matillion."
Similarly, Naggi Asmar, chief engineering officer at Matillion, noted that ThoughtSpot's and Matillion's platforms can work together to reduce data preparation workloads and speed the process of reaching insight and action.
"It's about getting the data from different sources and making it analytics-ready as soon as possible," he said. "With a no-code solution, we are able to shorten that time and get customers that data as it's coming into the source system."
Asmar added that in addition to technological synergy, ThoughtSpot and Matillion make good partners because they were founded around the same time, have grown at a comparable rate and are similarly able to work in concert with most major cloud data storage platforms.
"We're very similar in terms of where we are as companies," he said. "Our goal is to unlock data for the data user and deliver that as quickly as possible, and we think the alignment of our goals is great. This is why we're partnering with ThoughtSpot."
To add more speed and ease of use to the analytics process, in November 2021, ThoughtSpot introduced SpotApps, tools that now figure prominently with the Matillion connection.
SpotApps are prebuilt analytics applications for specific third-party workplace applications such as Salesforce and Snowflake. They can be deployed without writing code and were designed to enable users to quickly derive value from the data collected by those workplace applications.
Matillion, meanwhile, has developed ETL templates that similarly simplify data integration.
As ThoughtSpot adds SpotApps for more and more applications, one of the main benefits of its new partnership with Matillion will be the ability to make the data collected through SpotApps actionable even more quickly than before the partnership, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
"The focus here is on speeding time to value and minimizing technical complexity through the combination of Matillion's low-code/no-code ETL templates and ThoughtSpot's SpotApps," he said. "It's largely a matter of using point-and-click … ETL templates and prebuilt ThoughtSpot SpotApps rather than coding on the data integration side and building dashboards and reports on the BI side."
Henschen added that ThoughtSpot and Matillion make sense as partners given their cloud-native capabilities and emphasis on working in concert with cloud data repositories such as Databricks, Snowflake and Amazon Redshift.
"Matillion is a cloud-native company that has focused on supporting the fast-growing, cloud-based analytical data platforms," he said. "It's a natural fit given that's also where ThoughtSpot has turned all of its attention since shifting to focus entirely on cloud deployment."
Future plans
While the partnership combines the existing capabilities of ThoughtSpot and Matillion such as SpotApps and ETL templates, the vendors plan to expand more collaborative capabilities going forward.
ThoughtSpot plans to add more SpotApps -- its latest SpotApps were unveiled in May and included accelerators for Amazon Redshift, Databricks and Google Analytics -- so Matillion's ETL tools will enable users to quickly integrate data from any new SpotApps as they are added.
Beyond specific workplace applications, like Snowflake and Databricks, among others, ThoughtSpot plans to add tools targeting specific industries, aiming to make it faster and easier for organizations to work with their data by providing prebuilt templates.
And as with SpotApps, Matillion's ETL templates will enable joint users to more quickly integrate data from those industry-specific templates that they would have been able to without ThoughtSpot's integration with Matillion, according to Vahalia.
"Where we will focus next is on one or two [system integrators] and specific verticals on top of that -- for example, financial services with a specific system integrator," he said.
