Talend Unfurls Integration Cloud

Five Critical Questions to Ask Before Moving Data to the Cloud

After establishing itself as a major provider of integration software inside the data center, Talend is now making the move to the cloud.

The company today announced Talend Integration Cloud, a set of integration services that can be invoked via the cloud but actually executed anywhere using a run-time engine. The services are hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Ashley Stirrup, chief marketing officer for Talend, says the run-time engine makes it possible for Talend to offer different levels of pricing based on the complexity of the integration task. Integration that takes place in the cloud, for example, is priced starting at $1,000 per month, while hybrid cloud integration is priced starting at $2,000 per month. There’s also an elastic option that enables IT organizations to have unfettered access starting at $4,500 per month.

Stirrup says that the run-time engine also enables IT organizations to address issues such as data sovereignty while still being able to take advantage of an inexpensive cloud integration platform.

Initially, Talend Integration Cloud will be available using Talend Integration Cloud Studio tools and an HTML5 portal that can be accessed from any browser-enabled device. Later this year, Talend intends to add support for real-time integration and the ability to programmatically invoke the services using an application programming interface (API) gateway.

While Talend has developed over 800 connectors for its integration software, Stirrup says the company is gaining a lot of momentum in Big Data integration scenarios. Talend Integration Cloud connects to all Hadoop and NoSQL sources and automatically generates native MapReduce, Spark or Storm code to run in the cloud—including on the AWS Redshift data warehouse service—or on Hadoop distributions running on premise.

To that end, Talend has also created Talend Exchange, an online community through which both “citizen integrators” and professional developers can share templates and components for extracting, cleansing and sharing data between thousands of applications.

Stirrup says these capabilities are especially important because a new survey of over 100 IT managers and directors from medium- to large-sized organizations released today by Talend clearly shows increased reliance of public clouds for data warehousing. The survey finds that usage of cloud Business Intelligence (BI) will increase from 19 percent of respondents today to 73 percent over the next three years. The survey also finds that Hadoop as a Service appears poised for strong growth, with 77 percent of respondents expecting to use Hadoop in the cloud within three years.

Where all that data might be integrated, of course, is debatable. The one thing that is for certain is that most organizations will be looking for an integration framework that allows them to keep their options open.