In an effort to enable organizations to make better sense of data, Talend updated its Data Fabric with new capabilities, including data inventory, intelligence and preparation features.
The updates come as part of the Winter '20 release of Talend Data Fabric, a suite of data integration and management tools. Talend, based in Redwood City, Calif., has extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities at the core of its product portfolio and has expanded its offerings in recent years to address the growing need for different data management functionality to support business intelligence and analytics applications.
The cloud integration data vendor unveiled the Winter '20 release Feb. 27, with general availability of the data inventory feature expected by the end of March.
The Winter '20 release of Talend Data Fabric reflects the maturity of Talend's cloud data integration and intelligence offerings and introduces more artificial intelligence-based automation to the portfolio, said IDC analyst Steward Bond.
"Organizations are looking for more data engineering, collaboration, intelligence and integration capabilities in hybrid environments," Bond said. "They are also looking for more AI-based automation to come into data integration and data intelligence [DII] products, to help simplify the complexities of data environments in the era of the digital economy."
Dashboard view of Talend Data Inventory console
Expanding data fabric with data inventory
Among the key new features in Talend Data Fabric is data inventory, which fits into a category known as data intelligence.
Organizations are looking for more data engineering, collaboration, intelligence and integration capabilities in hybrid environments.
Stewart BondAnalyst, IDC
"Data intelligence is intelligence about the data, not from the data," Bond said. "IDC puts data profiling and stewardship, master data intelligence, data cataloging and data lineage software into the category of data intelligence. "
The Talend Data Inventory feature is how Talend is delivering data cataloging functionality in the cloud, but it should not be confused with the Talend Data Catalog offering, which is an on-premises Data Catalog product, Bond noted.
In some ways, Talend Data Inventory has capabilities beyond what a basic data catalog offers, but many of the modern data catalog products are much more than the metadata management systems of the past. The newer ones add automation, crowdsourcing, quality intelligence and collaboration capabilities to enable organizations with data.
Going beyond the enterprise data catalog to data inventory
Data inventory is different than Talend's enterprise data catalog in terms of how the technology is embedded and used, said Jean-Michel Franco, senior director of product marketing at Talend.
"We feel that the future of the data catalog is to bring the data catalog inside all the applications that you can," Franco said. "You can expose the data, you can bring transparency on the data, and also with all the intelligence and metadata, we can make things more automatic."
Talend pipeline designer improves data preparation capabilities
Another area of Talend Data Fabric that is being enhanced is the vendor's Pipeline Designer, a tool for developing and deploying data pipelines. In the Winter '20 update, Talend is adding data quality inspection to the designer to inspect data before it is consumed in another application.
The Talend Pipeline Designer can be used to connect to different data sources, including streaming data or data lakes, to an application or data analytics process, Franco said.
"Pipeline Designer connects to the data wherever it is, and it brings the data to where you want it to be," he said.
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