Talend Extends Reach into Data Governance

Talend has been widely employed as an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment to pull various data sources together via a cloud service. Now Talend is extending the scope of that iPaaS environment to include Talend Data Preparation, a data management tool that can be employed to cleanse data and govern who gets access to specific types of information that will become part of a fall release of Talend Data Fabric announced today.

Mark Balkenende, manager for technical product marketing at Talend, says that because Talend already provides the platform through which data is shared, it makes sense for the company to also provide tools to manage and govern that data.

Data management capabilities that will be added via Talend Data Preparation include the ability to allow users to self-service access to specific sets of data within the context of a web application as well as tools for cleansing data in a way that provides a standard way of describing, for example, a customer name.

Balkenende says those increased demands are putting pressure on internal IT organizations to find ways to make data rapidly available in a way that doesn’t result in violations of compliance regulations.

“End users today are demanding immediate access to data,” says Balkenende. “But IT organizations can keep up with it.”

There’s a lot of talk these days about data being the new oil. But just like oil, most data is useless until it is refined. The challenge facing IT organizations is figuring out how to make all the data flowing across the various pipelines into actual business assets. The best place to arguably focus those efforts is at an iPaaS hub through which most of that data passes through on its way to be consumed by one application or another.