Talend Data Fabric adds data observability features, connector updates

Data management and integration veteran Talend today debuted the winter ‘23 release of its core platform, providing enhanced observability, automation and connectivity for enterprises’ data assets. The update comes over a month after the company announced it is being acquired by Qlik in a transaction set to close in the first half of 2023.

Talend started in 2004 as a data integrator, but gradually expanded to offer Talend Data Fabric, a unified solution that works across any cloud, hybrid or multicloud environment. The solution combines enterprise-grade data discovery, integration, quality (automatic cleaning and profiling) and governance capabilities. It’s is intended to reduce the effort involved in working with data, while providing teams with clean and uncompromised information for decision-making. 

The new release of Talend Data Fabric builds out the platform’s capabilities, giving enterprises a trust score that enables teams to closely observe the reliability of any data asset at a glance. This is said to strengthen trust in the data being integrated by the platform.

With the latest release, the company is also building on the platform’s existing data quality and integrity elements by bringing observability into the mix. Data professionals can now automatically and proactively monitor the quality of their data over time. That is particularly important, as data quality is very dynamic.

Teams using Data Fabric can use dataset crawling or tags to uncover data blind spots and find new datasets relevant to the business. They can also instantaneously check the validity and usage of data types across the datasets; apply contextual data quality rules; and monitor how data quality evolves using the trust score, which acts as a gauge to measure the quality of data. 

This capability empowers enterprises to continuously monitor data throughout its lifecycle, and understand and impact how it evolves and moves to fuel positive business outcomes, according to Jason Penkethman, chief product officer at Talend. This is important, as observability is a key product in today’s enterprise technology space. The many companies offering solutions in this area include Acceldata, Monte Carlo and Datafold.

What else is new in Talend Data Fabric?

Along with monitoring capabilities, Talend has focused on improving data connectivity and AI-driven automation with the winter ‘23 release. 

For data connectivity, the company said it is expanding its lineup of 1,000+ connectors and components, adding certified connectors for SAP S/4HANA and SAP business warehouse on HANA, as well as support for ad platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter and modern cloud databases, including Amazon Keyspaces, Azure SQL Database, Google Bigtable and Neo4j Aura Cloud. 

On the automation front, it is bringing AI-powered smart services that simplify the scheduling and orchestration of cloud jobs, allowing users to pause and resume tasks and use smart timeouts to cut compute time and improve operational efficiency.

The company also said it is updating Stitch, its fully managed cloud ETL service, with new role-based access control to provide better segregation of administrator duties, and new pipeline monitoring capabilities that will allow data teams to get key metrics on data ingestion, including data volumes, data freshness, and schema changes. There’s also a new History mode for Snowflake, which enables easy tracking of data changes.

In the highly diverse data integration space, Talend competes with players like IBM, Informatica, Mulesoft, Fivetran and Matillion.

Last year, Talend was named a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Data integration Tools. It currently serves over 7,000 enterprise customers, including Toyota, Domino’s, Lenovo, Foodpanda and eBay.