Talend Unveils Open Source Data Cleansing Tool

Automating the Intelligence of Business Intelligence

Like never before, companies are using data to make business decisions. The challenge for IT organizations is to make sure that that data — increasing every day — is of the best quality. That means that IT is spending an inordinate amount of time cleansing data.

To make it economically feasible for organizations to enable business users to cleanse that data themselves and quickly turn it into informed business actions, Talend unveiled an open source desktop Talend Data Preparation data cleansing application.

Ashley Stirrup, chief marketing officer for Talend, says the basic idea is to make it inexpensive for IT organizations to distribute a data cleansing tool to everyone in the organization. Although the product uses the same technology as that for an enterprise-class cloud service, the desktop version will typically be used against data stored in, for example, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Rather than present end users with an overly complex data cleansing tool, Stirrup says, Talend focused on making Talend Data Preparation as intuitive as possible. The basic idea is to make it attractive for end users to cleanse as much of their own data as possible versus relying on overworked IT departments to do it for them. Stirrup says Talend Data Preparation is also designed to work seamlessly with Talend cloud services to import data.

Whatever the motivation, the fact remains that more end users are taking on the roles of “citizen developer and integrator.” The challenge is finding a way to enable that behavior using data that has been vetted by someone in the organization that actually knows whether it’s right or wrong in the first place.