Diversity and inclusion of underrepresented voices has been shown to improve customer orientation and decision-making.  It also helps organizations become more creative through exposure to a variety of perspectives. That’s why I’m excited to announce Talend’s participation as a charter partner in the recently announced CS YOU program, which trains individuals from underrepresented communities and places them in entry-level customer success apprenticeship roles at companies.

CS YOU is sponsored by Gainsight, a customer retention SaaS platform, and tech industry training company SV Academy. I first learned of the program during the Human First CEO podcast that our CEO, Christal Bemont, did with Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. I was immediately intrigued and wanted to explore how Talend could get involved.

CS YOU provides a four-week training program through SV Academy that teaches job candidates the skills they need for tech-based sales roles, finds them an eight-week internship at a tech company, and provides up to a year of ongoing coaching and mentorship thereafter — at no cost to the candidates. All costs are paid by employers — including, we’re happy to say, Talend.

2020 has been a year of transformation for the Talend Customer Success organization. We’re proud of the momentum we’ve maintained and the continuous improvements we’re making in our business to serve our customers. Participating in the CS YOU is another way we can do this. We are thrilled to be a part of a program that can help create a more inclusive customer success industry, representing people of all backgrounds.

If you are interested in applying to the CS YOU program, check out https://sv.academy/customer-success-fellowship.

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What a pivotal year it’s been for the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market!

Today, improving customer centricity, driving new innovative applications and systems to market, or optimizing supply chains to meet new digital demands have become so critical to many organizations’ growth. These changes are also requiring every member of the organization to become more intelligent and literate about their data; it’s no wonder data (both analytical and operational) continues to be at the center of every strategic initiative.

This exponential demand has brought about some innovative changes to the enterprise. We’ve seen the transformation of what used to be shadow IT into new, agile business units: IT departments driving traditional analysts, application developers, and even SaaS administrators to expand their focus to include integration. It’s become part of their daily life and critical to their success.

According to Gartner, “An enterprise iPaaS (EiPaaS) is a suite of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technologies. An iPaaS provides capabilities to enable subscribers (also known as “tenants”) to implement integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints, including APIs, mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is achieved by developing, deploying, executing, managing and monitoring integration processes and flows that connect multiple endpoints, so that they can work together.”

It’s no wonder we’ve seen our iPaaS capabilities consumed faster than any integration technology that we can remember.  Most recently we’ve reported over 130% YoY growth of our cloud business. 

This growth speaks volumes to the importance integration and iPaaS has for organizations. We’re extremely proud of our recognition as a Challenger in this year’s 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, as we believe it validates our continued commitment to our customers’ success and demonstrates our ability to execute with the right iPaaS product for the market today. Through that involvement, we see amazing potential to not only evolve how Talend helps organizations with their integration needs, but also the needs of the overall market.

Trust is a very powerful word

One of the areas that you’ve heard us talk a lot about is trust. Trust is a very powerful word. Imagine the impact when you can say with confidence that you trust the information flowing through your business, whether it’s the data within your reports or the operational events and messages that propagate through your applications and real-time systems.

Talking about the subject makes me chuckle because we’re an integration company, solving the same data challenges internally that many of our customers face. Just the other day we prevented a potential issue where bad data entered through one application and almost propagated through our entire sales and marketing cloud.

What could have created a month-long cleaning process was caught because we had put the proper steps in place for this typical application integration. Placing these types of governance and quality controls throughout the process is essential. Bad data in just one application can and will explode across the business, infecting every other system it touches.

That’s why built-in, automated data quality features like those in Talend Data Fabric are so critical to the success of a data-driven organization; one that requires the iPaaS’s fundamental flexibility while also preventing bad data from proliferating across the systems it connects.

We know many are faced with the same challenges, which is why we believe it’s so important to enable your team with the full scope of an iPaaS’s capabilities, including data quality – it’s why you see Talend focusing on our Trust Score.

Integrate and innovate with your cloud environments

We’re also seeing an ever-growing shift to cloud-based computing and customers who expect an iPaaS capable of integration across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud deployments, natively.

There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t see a CIO announcing they’re ALL IN on Azure, AWS, or Google, and with many legacy iPaaS solutions limiting what can be run in their hosted environment, we often see prospects taking on significant technical debt from their vendors because they have a propriety approach instead of using an existing cloud equivalent. For many of our customers, their iPaaS solution not only democratizes integration, but maximizes the larger cloud investment! In this regard, not all iPaaS solutions are created equal.

For Talend, this means making our solution complementary to organizations’ existing cloud infrastructures and architectures. Instead of requiring the use of proprietary infrastructure, Talend makes it possible for organizations to maximize current investments by leveraging the infrastructure and runtimes already available from their cloud providers. This allows Talend Data Fabric to provide the requisite iPaaS benefits like simplified development and collaborative capabilities, executed in an organization’s existing cloud environment without additional complications.

In fact, this capability is what led customers like AstraZeneca to choose Talend in the first place. “We selected Talend for AWS connectivity, flexibility, and its licensing model,” says Andy McPhee, data engineering director at AstraZeneca. “We also valued the ability to scale rapidly without incurring extra costs from AWS or Talend.” We respect the choices our customers have made for their infrastructure and help them maximize on their cloud investments. Today, Talend is the only vendor/iPaaS solution with this model.

Customers also tell us our cloud model can help accelerate innovation. They do not need to worry about an iPaaS provider’s next release before moving ahead with their own business initiatives. Because Talend can run natively and does not require proprietary technology, organizations are not affected by vendor restrictions and can instead focus on their own innovation phase. Companies can take Talend, quickly deploy it in their cloud of choice, and succeed.

This is what we mean when we say that Talend is cloud-native. We help our customers enjoy the benefits of cloud scale and cost savings without the headaches of propriety software. The legacy approach of “always on“ and “always charged” no longer applies.

What’s next

Trusting the information that flows through the business and maximizing the investment being made on cloud are two areas that we’re most excited to continue to support with our customers, but that’s just the beginning. As we mentioned earlier, there’s a whole new class of integrators within organizations, and how integration platforms support their needs is critically important.

For Talend, we believe that enabling intelligence within the platform to simplify integration and quality needs to the point of autonomous integration is a core foundation of our roadmap. You’re starting to see some of this with the addition of Magic Fill within Data Preparation and enhancements we’ve made to Pipeline Designer. We look forward to the future releases in support of this effort, and our continued support of our iPaaS use cases and customers. It’s an exciting time for integration, and we invite you to join us on our path forward.

To read more about Gartner’s report of the enterprise iPaaS landscape, subscribers may visit their website to download the full report.

Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service,” Eric Thoo, Massimo Pezzini, Keith Guttridge, Bindi Bhullar, Shameen Pillai, Abhishek Singh, September 21, 2020

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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Today, companies can measure every aspect of business health, except the health of their data which drives business decisions. Data is vital to inform critical decisions such as identifying new routes to market, systems to support business agility, and more resilient supply chains. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “Your organization’s data is the source of both the opportunity and the challenges to your innovation. The difference is whether you can convert raw data sets into clear, actionable information.”  It is critical  for companies to get decisions right but, for most companies, there’s virtually no connection between the analytics systems running the business and the people and technologies designed to ensure the data powering those systems can be trusted.

In fact, having reliable data is crucial at all levels of decision making across any organization.

• For executive decision-makers who are operating under extreme internal and external pressures to make the right decision, clean and uncompromised data can dramatically improve the quality and accuracy of decision making across the organization.
• For business users who are inundated with dashboards and reports but struggle to understand what matters and what to trust, concise data provides a clear measure of data reliability, backed by a record of where that data originated and how it has been modified.
• For technical users who juggle countless requests to deliver timely, accurate, and digestible data, and need more insight into and control over the data that their internal partners are using, trusted data provides tangible proof of the accuracy and completeness of their work and frees them up to focus on complex analytics.

Improving the health of data used by a company should follow a core set of principles, which we refer to as: “the five Ts of trust.” Your data must be thorough, transparent, timely, traceable, and tested. The new Talend Trust Score, designed to help users dynamically rate data sets based on these criteria, could fundamentally change the way we use all available data and insights to make decisions.

To learn more about the health of company data, read this recent article published by Harvard Business Review.

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Talend is celebrating its 15^th anniversary this year. It’s a milestone we couldn’t have achieved without our customers, partners, and the heart and soul of Talend, our employees.

Fifteen years ago, French entrepreneurs, Fabrice Bonan and Bertrand Diard, set out in Suresnes, France, to make data access and management faster and better by democratizing technology.  With open source beginnings, Talend launched its first paid product in 2007 and the following year we debuted at an industry tradeshow in France.  One of our early employees shared an anecdote from that time where we had permitted a TV crew to recharge their camera battery at Talend’s first ever booth and as an unexpected thank you, we were featured on national television.  The rest is data history …

Today, Talend is a publicly traded company with offices throughout the world. Talend’s successes have not diminished the celebration of its roots; the company’s unique identity continues to reflect our European heritage.  Corporate headquarters are in Redwood City, CA, but we evoke a tangible coolness – a certain je ne sais quoi – that sets us apart from other Silicon Valley firms.  It is Talend’s incredible culture and work environment that stands out and it is what will propel the company forward. 

While data reigns supreme at Talend, hands down, it’s our employees who are the heart of this company.  Woven into the fabric of our culture is an emphasis on employee diversity, acceptance and inclusion of thought.  We ask our employees to bring their authentic self to the workplace, and this begins with me.  The value placed in honest conversations help drive our highly engaged teams, and our willingness to grasp that mistakes may be made along the way sparks our innovative creativity.  Simply put, we hire and develop an incredibly talented group who work around the globe on a common vision, and we show up for our customers and for each other.

The commitment to our customers is evident through the years. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Dominos and Loreal continue to rely on Talend as a strategic partner to help run their business on trusted data. They get the data they need to design exceptional customer experiences, improve operations, ensure compliance, and drive innovation.  Our ability to meet customers where they are on their data journey is unique to Talend. We help our customers digitally transform to answer questions and power innovation to gain a competitive edge and achieve what they never thought possible.

At this fifteen-year mark, I know it’s the strength of our people and obsession with supporting companies around the globe that will drive us to evolve as a company. We are laying the foundation for accelerated growth and scale. Our purpose is to change the way the world makes decisions and we do that by making data useful for all organizations in any stage of their digital transformation.

Thank you to everyone in our extended Talend community who has contributed to our success.  My own journey here at Talend has just begun.  Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity to learn from employees, partners, and customers.  I have experienced and understand why people choose to work with Talend.  There is passion, pride, and energy in our culture that permeates throughout our organization and I am thrilled to lead Talend to the next level.

Happy 15^th anniversary, Talend!

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Imagine if you bought a beautiful lake house, invited all your friends to come and visit, and the lake was dry?  Not much value and a little embarrassing, right?

Now imagine you have that beautiful lake house and you have special water valves to control not just if there is water in the lake but also control the water quality, clarity, and what fish the lake is stocked with?  Much more impressive, correct?

Delta Lake on Databricks is that beautiful lake house and Stitch from Talend is that water valve in this metaphor.

A Powerful BI Experience on Data Lakes

Databricks has recently announced the availability of SQL Analytics and several months ago, Talend released support for Delta Lake on Databricks in Stitch.  The combination of these two services enable data analysts and business intelligence developers to quickly and easily load data into Delta Lake on Databricks with the agility and scale of a fully-managed data pipeline service in a few clicks of the mouse.

Stitch reduces the barriers to loading data into a Delta Lake by providing a simple but powerful interface to define data replication processes from over 100 different data sources into Databricks Delta.  While it is very simple to define the replication process, Stitch provides a highly scalable and reliable SaaS based engine to perform those processes.  It literally takes 5 minutes or less to define the data replication process, you turn it on, and you forget about it because it just works, every time, all the time.

This is important for Databricks SQL Analytics because anyone who wants to perform SQL based analytics, can get their enterprise data into the data lake in minutes and leverage the reliability and performance of Delta Lake and none of the hassle traditionally expected. To deliver a powerful BI experience on a data lake, especially those enabled by Delta Lake, Databricks leverages its newly launched Delta Engine, a vectorized query engine that includes a query optimizer and caching capabilities that accelerate query performance on Delta Lake. This allows analysts and BI developers to access complete, recent, and reliable data to build dashboards and reports in minutes.  It also allows ETL/ELT developers using Talend Studio to leverage the Delta Engine for data engineering jobs.

For example, your VP of Sales asks for an analysis of regional sales performance using your Salesforce data.  You set up the integration in Talend Stitch (5 minutes), allow the data to replicate (5 to 15 minutes), and start building SQL reports in the Databricks UI.  In under an hour, you have your sales analytics results.

And then your VP of Marketing asks to augment that analysis with Marketo data and Google Adwords to see which sales region provided the best marketing spend ROI.  Just set up an integration with Marketo to Databricks and Google AdWords to Databricks, and again, in minutes you have your results.

Compared with traditional Hadoop or Data Warehouse approaches, what can be done in minutes or hours with Databricks and Talend used to take days, weeks, or even months to accomplish.

The combination of Delta Lake on Databricks, Databricks SQL Analytics, and Stitch from Talend gives you a data lake stocked with data that helps you be more agile, more efficient, and most importantly will impress your business leaders with fast, high quality answers without spending a lot of money.  Start impressing your business leaders now with a trial account or find Stitch in the Databricks Partner Gallery.

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Happy anniversary to us! Fifteen years ago, Talend’s founders anticipated the business need to have data accessible to all users across an organization. I’ve been with Talend since the beginning, and I wanted to celebrate this milestone by sharing our product innovation and evolution through the years. 

Talend was created with the idea that we could offer something new to the market: open source ETL. There was a lot of momentum behind open source at the time, and the idea was that we could deliver a lot of new benefits to our users through open source. And it worked! We quickly made inroads which would have otherwise been difficult given the established players at the time.

One of the key benefits we provided was visibility. Other products are like a black box for users — you don’t know what’s happening with data beyond a certain point. In contrast to that, Talend generates source code that users can look at, audit, and even integrate into their own continuous integration tools to build off of separately from Talend.

Talend has always prioritized understanding how customers work with data, and how we could best support that. From the beginning, we combined ETL and ELT in a single product, which was not available in the market at that time. Having both of these capabilities was critical for our next milestone: working with big data. When you look at big data, if Talend was only capable of ETL, then the only thing we could have done was load data to a data lake. But with ELT capabilities, we realized we could do something far more interesting than that: We could generate transformations on top of big data directly on the data lake. And that was unheard of at the time.

This innovative approach to big data also applied to the cloud. Moving to the cloud and the simplicity and power it provides meant that more people could benefit from our solutions. We changed the way we built software, adding additional focus on the user experience for the past several years so that people who are less technical and more focused on business uses can get up and running quickly. Today, our software platform, Talend Data Fabric, provides the flexibility to help customers migrate to and run hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. 

Over the years, data has become more valuable and more disruptive for businesses. We’re at an interesting inflection point in that every aspect of the way we solve data management problems is evolving: the architectures, the technologies, the infrastructure used, and even the people tasked with solving these problems.

Last month we named Krishna Tammana our new CTO.  Krishna comes most recently from Splunk and brings with him an extraordinary background of cloud and data expertise that will lead us to the next phase of growth and innovation.  He’s focused on making it as easy as possible for organizations to have timely access to data that’s clean, complete, and uncompromised. Our Talend Trust Score, inspired by neural network algorithms, is a good example of the direction we plan to take. Under Krishna’s leadership, our global R&D team will work toward a broader vision and roadmap — innovations that will enhance Talend’s capabilities to help our customers achieve trust in their data and in their decisions.

Buckle up. If the next 15 are anything like the last 15, it’ll be an incredible journey, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

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Stitch is now available with a European data center for faster and compliant analytics

It’s no secret that businesses are undergoing a dramatic digital acceleration during the pandemic. A recent Gartner CFO Survey characterizes this acceleration as “from the pace of a multi-year marathon to a 12-month sprint,” while a McKinsey survey estimates that organizations have shortened the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions by three to four years.

Lagging behind in turning data into answers is no longer an option. Analytics teams at companies of all sizes are front and center as executives ask, “What’s happening in our business?” Teams that can answer that question more quickly can better adapt to a changing global economy, while those that delay risk leaving their executives navigating in the dark.

To help analytics teams in Europe provide faster, more accurate answers to critical business questions, we’re pleased to announce that Stitch is now available with an EU data center. Companies in the EU can now use Stitch to access and consolidate data from over 120 sources into a data warehouse for analysis, while ensuring that their data never leaves the European Union. With critical data at their fingertips in just a few clicks, European businesses across all industries can spend less time managing data pipelines and more time developing the insights they need to provide exceptional customer experiences.

Correcting course with faster analytics

Let’s take the retail industry as an example. “Today, data is at the heart of everything we do,” says Guillaume Porquier, Information Systems Director at children’s fashion retailer Tape à l’œil. “In retail, you have to combine promptness with proximity. Information must be able to flow from product design to sales, otherwise we can’t do our jobs. If a product is not available at a certain time, the sale is lost. You run the risk both that the customer will turn to another retailer, and that the product will have to be sold at a discount at the end of the season. With COVID-19, some suppliers have had to suspend operations, and the real-time management of our supply chain allowed us to make the appropriate course changes very quickly.”

For businesses like Tape à l’œil in customer-obsessed industries, timely and accurate insights are the cornerstone of decision-making across supply chain, operations, and the entire customer lifecycle. “Stitch has played a crucial role in enabling us to capture digital traffic data from European merchant websites and post KPIs for our management team, as well as capture customer feedback through surveys from different angles,” Porquier says. “Stitch also retrieves campaign results from Facebook and Instagram to cross-reference them in our Snowflake data warehouse, making all this information available to the various disciplines.”

Where speed meets compliance

Stitch is a fully managed data pipeline for analytics that helps companies like Tape à l’œil deliver analytics projects faster. With a new data center hosted in the EU (AWS Frankfurt), European companies can ensure that their analytics work is GDPR-compliant while moving faster than ever before.

This feature is now generally available to anyone who signs up for Stitch. Of the new data center capability, Porquier says, “All our systems and data are hosted in Europe — cloud and on-premises — as part of our company’s GDPR compliance strategy. As we are expanding the use of Stitch and use cases, I am glad Talend has opened a new data center for Stitch in the EU, further supporting our data journey.”

If you are interested in delivering analytics projects faster with Stitch, you can try the product for free at stitchdata.com, and you can select the EU data center option when you sign up.

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1. What does the IT industry need to do to attract more women in the years ahead?

The lack of workforce diversity must be acknowledged as an ongoing problem and faced head-on. Gender diversity should be a part of your organization’s core culture without remaining in a silo. Innovation and problem-solving only work through the combined collaboration of different genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and races. Each one offers a unique experience and perspective. 

In my experience, the technology industry is male dominated. It is not rare that teams with 100s of technologists have no women. In a recent tech industry job, I had peers who had no women on their teams, and they were not sure about what they had to do to attract women to join their teams and fit in. Corporate culture influences women in ways that make them feel they don’t fit in or support their co-workers. Therefore, the technical female profile must be understood, attracted, and fully integrated into a team dynamic, not classified as indigenous among a group of men. This education empowers women to feel comfortable in the workplace. A first step forward is including women in your interview panels to maintain gender equality in the tech sector, even if the female profile isn’t part of the specific team.

2. What do IT companies need to do to ensure that more women have the opportunity to achieve senior leadership roles within their organizations?

When attending past meetings, I heard this all too often, “Anne, you’re probably not technical enough to understand this.” The reality is that I’m an engineer with the same background as the person sitting next to me! However, the fact that others witness the interaction, they think the statement is true. It isn’t because the host was trying to be mean or didn’t like me. We are all bias, including women who often believe that they are not good enough. Blame it on a lack of proper education and recognition for women’s role in shaping the tech industry. There are natural and unintentional prejudices in the workplace that lead people to think a woman is less technical and intelligent than a man. Recognizing that these prejudices exist is already a good start.

I’m a strong proponent of providing internal sponsors who vouch for women’s skills and represent them as high-performing assets to a technology organization, particularly annual performance reviews or promotion discussions. Women might need additional assistance to educate and remind executives that they’re just as deserving of a promotion as men based on their experience and skills. Ideally, the sponsor should be a man, as he can be the best advocate for a woman trying to grow. Otherwise, we’ll just see women fighting for women’s rights. We need to bridge the gender gap and ensure men fight for gender diversity.

3. What is the government’s role in attracting more women into STEM-based (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) qualifications?

Education is key. Young girls should be exposed to computers from an early age, understanding that they’re essential to daily life and can open many professional doors for them later in life. Furthermore, the academic system must take an active position on educating this demographic, inspiring young girls to pursue careers in computer science and programming. Young women shouldn’t believe computers are just for geeks or people performing tedious jobs in a lab or office.

When I studied software engineering, most of my teachers were men, geeks, and not the type of people you’d necessarily aspire to be as a young girl. Yet, these persistent and subconscious images of male mathematicians and scientists could explain why girls enter STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) at drastically lower rates. This thinking needs to change if we’re to empower women in tech. While there are plenty of legitimate reasons for a balanced and diverse team, we shouldn’t force diversity; otherwise, it looks like companies are doing it to check a box, so regulations to make this happen are fair.

4. What can women do to support themselves and their peers to drive a more diverse and inclusive global IT industry?

Promoting a sense of community to discuss industry and workplace challenges is integral for maintaining a tech industry voice. Many associations, groups, and events for women are accessible, not least of which is The Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. GHC was one of my favorite pre-Covid conferences to attend. The skills I learned and the relationships I made there helped get me to where I am today.

5. How do we get more women interested in tech?

The social status quo in the IT workplace should no longer apply. It’s time to break down barriers to equality. We need to feature technical women in a way that resonates with young female audiences. A women’s general societal perception needs to change because we can do anything. The only real barrier is the one we build in our minds.

The post How the IT Industry can Inspire more Women, an interview with Talend CISO Anne Hardy appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Jamie Kiser, COO and CCO at Talend, explains why retailers, striving to ensure they’re not missing out on future opportunities, must leverage one thing: data. By utilizing customer intelligence and better data management, retailers can collect supply chain data in real-time, make better orders to suppliers based on customer intelligence.

While major industries from tech to the public sector felt COVID’s pain points, not many felt them as acutely as retail. Retailers must now contend with everything from unreliable supply chains to a limit on the number of customers in-store at any given time, as consumer behavior shifted with social distancing guidelines and new needs.

For example, e-commerce grew by 44% in 2020. As we begin recovering from the pandemic, retailers increasingly push to deliver their customers an in-store shopping experience as seamless as it is online. However, these new digital strategies rely on precise inventory management, which remains a pain point for many brick-and-mortar stores.

For retailers to ensure they’re not missing out on future opportunities, they need to leverage one thing: data. By utilizing customer intelligence and better data management, retailers can collect supply chain data in real-time, make better orders to suppliers based on customer intelligence. Data will help retailers fully integrate their supply chain, customer, and in-store data to ensure they’re creating an in-store experience that’s competitive to shopping online and other new shopping behaviors.

Eyes on the supply (chain)

The pandemic has revealed the fragility of the supply chain. With unprecedented unpredictability in what products stores will and will not have access to and when retailers need to integrate real-time data management into their online operations. Investing in supply chain data strategies enables retailers to adapt and adjust to sudden breakdowns from their suppliers.

Like Wayfair and Dick’s Sporting Goods, some companies leverage real-time inventory data to make their supply chain transparent to their customers, so they are always up to date on what is and isn’t on the shelves. Investing in data management tools to collect supply chain data in real-time empowers retailers to create better customer experiences and saves stores the estimated billions in lost sales to customers discovering their desired item is out of stock.

However, supply chain erosion is not the only supply problem retailers will have to overcome. Some issues facing supply and inventory come from consumers, like last March’s run on toilet paper or the PS5 selling out before they even made it to shelves. Seemingly instantaneous changes in customer behavior can instantly impact what items retailers are prioritizing in orders from suppliers. But without understanding customer behavior, retailers can overcorrect and wind up with dead inventory on their hands.

Customer analytics influence orders

To avoid collecting dead inventory and ensure orders to suppliers are accurate to their customers’ desires, retailers need to integrate customer intelligence with their supply chain information systems. Combining this information empowers retailers to place orders from suppliers based on precise predictive models of customer behavior. This way, retailers will keep up with rapid consumer behavior changes and keep supply chains up to speed with the latest trends in brick and mortar shopping.

For example, buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) shopping experiences have been a growing trend among retailers and consumers the past few years, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. One survey found BOPIS sales grew by 208% in 2020. But BOPIS is not the only trend growing during the pandemic. It has also accelerated research online, purchase offline (ROPO). Finding success in both BOPIS and ROPO is entirely contingent on understanding what’s on the shelf, what suppliers bring in, and which items are unpopular and creating dead inventory. By collecting specific customer intelligence, such as the products customers are researching, retailers can build predictive models for when online research turns into an in-store sale.

Leveraging customer intelligence not only helps brick and mortar retailers keep shelves stocked with the products their customers wish to purchase but can also be integrated with supply chain data to optimize operations. Investment in data management and integration can positively impact retailers’ profits by allowing them to make purchasing decisions from suppliers based on supplier circumstances and customer demand. Pooling data from both suppliers and customers into a single source of truth gives retailers the ability to operate under intelligent predictive business models. It also will prevent direct profit loss to competitors. Research shows an estimated $36.3 billion is lost to brick-and-mortar competition annually to customers purchasing elsewhere upon discovering their desired item is out of stock.

An integrated approach to supply chain management

Integrating real-time supply chain data with customer intelligence can prevent customer walkouts and increase profits by mitigating the risks to the supply chain created by the pandemic. However, when this external data combines with internal data — like sales, restocking times, demand surges, and more – brick and mortar retailers can position their supply chain to be in sync with the real-time shopping occurring online and in-store. Better business intelligence and supply chain data management empower retailers to offer customers a competitive experience to find online. Doing this requires a robust data management system and a business-wide data strategy that integrates data across all verticals.

For example, European clothing retailer Tape à l’oeil, replaced an aging ERP system with a new SAP and Snowflake-based infrastructure to better capture digital traffic data as they made operations digital due to the pandemic. This addition to their existing platform allows Tape à l’oeil to capture customer feedback through surveys to capture satisfaction with a new collection. Now digital campaign results are easily retrieved from Facebook and Instagram to cross-reference them in Snowflake and share comprehensive reports with management. Making data the heart of their business strategy.

This new data strategy has allowed Tape à l’oeil to find success during these tumultuous times by integrating customer data into predictive models to help them act faster and mitigate risks in their supply chain. Tape à l’oei’s CIO said that leveraging data has allowed them to improve operations overall and give them the “agility” to react to disruptions in the supply chain swiftly.

The brick and mortar way forward

A year into the pandemic and the retail industry remains in an ever precarious state. However, consumer trends show there are still growth opportunities for the brick-and-mortar stores prepared to meet customer demand.

Making data management an integral part of retail operations will help companies meet the supply chain challenges presented by COVID-19 and empower them to keep their business growing.

A version of this article originally appeared in Retail Customer Experience

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I am pleased to announce that Talend has joined techUK, the leading UK’s technology trade association. With over 800 members across the UK, techUK drives innovation and collaboration across business, government and stakeholders to provide a better future for people, society, the economy, and the planet.

Data-driven innovation can lead to a better society, faster reaction to disruptions, and support the economy of tomorrow. It is no coincidence that Chancellor Rishi Sunak made a strong focus on tech when announcing the 2021 budget in March. Along with the “Build Back Better” plan, the budget will support the development of the digital industry, including technology, infrastructure and skills. One of the key measures is to increase the digitalization of SMBs: “130,000 small and medium sized businesses will be supported through the new Help to Grow scheme, providing the digital and management tools needed to innovate, grow and help drive recovery.”

As a leader in the data space, Talend will partner with techUK to work on some of the most important key development drivers such as cloud adoption and data analytics. We will also be involved in specific market discussions including public sector, energy and financial services to collaborate on the data and digital challenges of these industries, discuss about future disruptions, and best approaches for a long-term digital success, in a data literate world.

At Talend we strongly believe that allowing the right people to  leverage trusted data at the right time can deeply transform an organisation, support greater growth, and foster innovation while building the foundation of a sustainable future. As an active member of techUK, Talend is committed to the growth of the tech industry in the UK and for making the utilisation of data the core of its development.

Sue Daley, Director for Technology and Innovation at techUK, commented: “’We are thrilled to have Talend join techUK. As the leading technology trade organisation, we are proud to represent companies that want to make a difference in the industry. Data and cloud adoption are a key element of our work, now more than ever, and we are looking forward to working with Talend in this space and beyond.”

For more information about techUK and the work Talend will be involved in, please visit www.techuk.org

The post Shaping the future of cloud and data analytics in the UK: why Talend joined techUK appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Vermont Gas (VGS) is a leader in energy efficiency and innovation, offering a clean, safe, affordable choice for over 53,000 homes, businesses, and institutions in northwest Vermont.  They pride themselves on providing timely, comprehensive service for all their customers, ensuring they have heat, hot water, and energy to get through the cold New England winter.

However, VGS noted they were having some trouble getting service orders completed efficiently. They found they didn’t have enough trucks to fulfill their service orders, employees were working overtime, and customers weren’t getting their problems solved in a timely way. “We knew our existing reports were dated and challenging to maintain,” said Eric Hillmuth, Customer Technology Solutions Manager at Vermont Gas. “To solve this problem, we needed to implement an enterprise BI platform that will let us use data to address our business challenges like service quality and workforce efficiency.”

Launching the Data Rocket

If VGS wanted to deliver the caliber of service their customers expected, they needed accessible, healthy data they could trust in real time. And, to make sure everything runs as efficiently as possible, they wanted to have accurate data reporting available to anyone in the company who needed it.

To achieve this level of data health, VGS united four superheroes of data: Talend, Snowflake, Power BI on Azure, and Passerelle to coordinate it all — creating the Passerelle Data Rocket. VGS now has comprehensive, near real-time account information. With Talend, data that once existed in separate silos is now seamlessly integrated, streamlining customer information, billing systems, payment providers, and online account information to provide a superior customer experience. For data warehousing, Snowflake was the right solution because it scales significantly better than they ever thought possible. VGS was able to load their server data from all the way back to 1965 for maybe a few cents without even breaking a sweat. And to understand what all that real-time data means, VGS is using Power BI for their business analytics solution. “It was the best choice for visual analytics,” says Hillmuth. “The PowerBI offering best fit for our excel savvy users with rich features and easy to stand up services.”   

Hillmuth noted, “You can’t put a value on a solution that works end to end like the Passerelle Data Rocket. We fit better with Passerelle from the get-go and have since had a lot of success.”

A successful launch

Thanks to the successful Data Rocket launch, Vermont Gas employees have new reporting capabilities they didn’t have before. The company expects to be able to reduce overtime and provide more efficient management of service orders. This will improve employee satisfaction; with only 25 service technicians, employee satisfaction critical to keep delivering great service to customers. Happy employees lead to happy customers.

In addition, the Passerelle Data Rocket improves service order efficiency at a very reasonable cost. The solution was quick to implement as well. With Snowflake’s flexibility to only pay for what they use, VGS was able to put the Data Rocket into action during downtime in their existing projects.

Where will the Rocket go?

Hillmuth foresees all kinds of opportunities for improving customer satisfaction, introducing new products,and creating even more employee satisfaction with healthy, accessible data. The Passerelle Data Rocket can scale to support all data and all use cases, delivering further ROI on customer data in new areas like consumption and billing.

“Together with Talend, the Passerelle Data Rocket gives us the flexibility and confidence that the tool will do what we need it to. Unlike our legacy systems, you don’t need to be a software engineer to build powerful integrations,” says Hillmuth.

As VGS transitions to a post carbon business model, Hillmuth expects to leverage the Data Rocket to        help develop new products and strategies. In the next six to nine months, VGS plans to expand the number of data sources that are being pulled into the Data Rocket to gain more insights. With their next priority being to focus on using data to perform preventative maintenance on heating equipment. This will prevent late night calls in the dead of a Vermont winter where a technician needs to drive out to a customer in need.

And Vermont Gas is building more assets with Talend like using cloud-based data warehousing services to decrease reliance on on-premises infrastructure, improving business intelligence capabilities, and staying on the leading edge of technology. Hillmuth says, “The Passerelle Data Rocket allows us to make more intelligent business decisions, and that can only lead to better experiences for our customers.”

The post Achieving Energy Efficiency With Data Efficiency: Vermont Gas + Data Governance Leaders appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

The mission statement is so direct and uncomplicated. SU Queensland, a non-profit organization based in Australia, is all about “bringing hope to a young generation.”

The realities of delivering on this charter, of course, are multi-dimensional and complex. SU Queensland provides a wide range of services to schools, churches, and community groups across Australia, including youth camps, school chaplains, community engagement programs, and training and support for counselors and youth workers.

Keeping it all running smoothly involves managing large and diverse volumes of data—and that can be a complex challenge in itself. “We needed to integrate our data and make it vastly more accessible to more people in more places,” said James Angus, Service Evolution Manager for SU Queensland.

Two core challenges, one focal point

More specifically, James and his team were focused on solving two immediate challenges. “A couple of years ago, our Field Development Managers began taking on new responsibilities for managing multiple services, and we needed a better picture of who was doing what within each of our territories,” he said.

“Also, our marketing and fundraising teams were hitting limits on what our CRM system could do for them,” he said. “We needed better ways to email our prospective donors, do digital advertising, and track our communications and results over time.”

James defined three phases for solving the issues: CRM replacement; marketing automation using Salesforce Marketing Cloud; and integration & rollout. The key to success was finding a data integration solution that was cost-effective, non-disruptive to implement, and flexible enough to handle changes in requirements.

After considerable study and analysis, SU Queensland selected Talend in the cloud.

Why Talend? “It did it all.”

James and his team examined multiple options to solve their data integration needs, including custom middleware, custom code from the endpoint side, custom code from the Salesforce side, and commercial middleware.

“The other options we considered were either too expensive, too complex, or too insecure,” James recounted. “In the end, we chose Talend because it combined all of the characteristics we were looking for. It did it all.”

According to James, Talend in the cloud was by far the most cost-effective option, but it was also the most capable of meeting core requirements. For example:

• Talend made it possible to integrate all of the data sources from various functions—from finance systems such as invoicing and payroll, to business service management for chalincy and volunteers, to event registration and more—in a short timeframe.
• Using Talend did not require development expertise or highly specialized skills. The product’s drag-and-drop editor was easy to learn and use, and the use of GitLab for version control simplified life for the Operations team.
• Talend runs on the organization’s own infrastructure, simplifying compliance with privacy and other security requirements.
• Talend adapts quickly and easily to accommodate changes in data sources, endpoints, and other resources.
• The product is based on open source software, so it can continuously take advantage of refinements, new innovations, and support from many sources.

Early successes point to future potential

For James and his team, the results of using Talend over the past year have exceeded expectations. The implementation was carried out by a third-party consulting firm on time and without a hitch, and the product is delivering on its promise. “It just speaks to the stability of this platform that we can now just run massive jobs and keep running and not fail.” As an example, James provided the report below.

Other successes highlighted by James include:

• Onboarding: The initial training session was only eight hours, and it was enough to get James and his team up and running quickly. “The training was very thorough and the documentation was golden,” he said. “We’re still using it regularly.”
• Talend Community: While the third-party consultants did the initial build, the Talend Community was instrumental in answering questions and providing helpful insights as James and his team began using Talend in the cloud.
• Ability to Terraform the VM (remote engines): “With Google, we can run up the infrastructure really quickly; we can break it down; we can rebuild it if we need to. That’s really handy,” said James.
• Reduced VM size and cost: With Talend, SU Queensland was able to dramatically reduce its VM size and cost requirements.

What’s next? In a nutshell, bringing more flow to workflows, according to James. “Now that the capabilities of Talend have proven themselves, it’s less about ‘can we do it?’ and more about ‘what all can we do to streamline our workflows?’” he said.

The post Integrating Data to Build Emotional Health: How SU Queensland Uses Talend to Enrich Service Delivery appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Making the case for universal data health standards

It’s a big data world; we’re just living in it

In late 2020, a CEO at an American bank revealed the thinking that’s becoming common in many businesses these days. “We’re a 103-year-old bank,” their CEO told me. “We’re doing everything on spreadsheets. But we are trying to become a highly profitable, digital-first bank that anticipates financial needs and empowers our clients with frictionless experiences. We need to become a data company.”

Companies in every industry are utterly dependent on their data. Retailers do more than sell goods in stores; their success depends on collecting, analyzing, and sharing data on consumer behavior, preferences, and actions. Financial services companies can mine the wealth of data they obtain on trades for insights and sell it as a source of intelligence, creating additional revenue streams. Healthcare providers no longer just treat their patients’ illnesses and injuries — rather, they collect and analyze data to treat the patient before their condition becomes acute.

Every business is now in the data business. Even before COVID hit, many organizations had already begun that journey. When we found ourselves face-to-face with a global pandemic, the need to transform became more urgent.

Too many trees and not enough forest

But even though companies want and need to become data-driven, they’re not that successful at doing it yet. Surveys show that nearly 70% of companies report that they have not created a data-driven organization, and over half are not yet treating data as a business asset. Companies know that the path to the future depends on using data. So why is using data so challenging?

For decades, managing and using data for analysis was focused on the mechanics of the process: collecting data, cleaning it, storing it, and cataloging it. It turns out this was the wrong problem to solve. The preoccupation with the mechanics of data management created some enormous challenges:

• There’s no connection between the people who prepare data and those who make the decisions or assess the state of the business.
• There’s no way for the people and systems on the front lines to easily validate that the data fueling day-to-day business is reliable or risk-free.
• The piecemeal approach to managing, integrating, and storing data has created silos. It is expensive and difficult to manage, and it also creates dark data where analysis cannot penetrate.
• For the most part, software and platforms for moving, collecting, preparing, and storing data is not helping companies gain a deeper understanding of the data they have or helping drive better data outcomes.

More and more companies finally realize that this piecemeal approach doesn’t work. It’s not enough to simply collect, move, and prepare data more efficiently. 

Data management is focused on the wrong things

The data management market, estimated to be worth about $130 billion, has attracted a lot of attention recently, and rightly so. These solutions have become highly effective at moving and storing more corporate data. But in our view, for many companies, this efficiency is creating as much of a risk as it is a reward. 

While capturing and storing data was a problem, it was never the problem and certainly never the end game. The old message to companies was that they should collect as much data as possible and figure out how to use it later. Well, later has arrived and many companies are ill-equipped to move from being data-saturated to being data-driven.

When data is moved and stored without any other considerations, it essentially becomes a digital landfill of corporate information. Instead of solving problems, data is making it harder to sort through the chaos. Companies are drowning in their data.

We have a very scary situation on our hands. A huge number of companies, all of which rely on data to stay in business and now also believe they need to become a data company, still haven’t addressed some of the most basic components of the data equation. They still don’t know what data they have, where it is, or who is using it, and, critically, they have absolutely no way to measure its health. 

Ask any company how they measure the health of their business, and they will list metrics backed by the data they run their business on. Besides employees, data is the single most important asset any company has, yet it’s the least understood or measured. Data runs the world, and yet it’s the one thing we understand the least.

Getting a pulse on corporate data health

Data management can’t be a simple pass-through as it typically is today. It needs to be an active and intentional system that increases an organization’s understanding of its data — its reliability, risk, and opportunity to provide value for the business. You should have visibility and clarity in your data. The solutions you use to manage data should provide the knowledge that will help make your organization smarter, more agile, and more efficient while avoiding risk.

This may sound impossible. Is it really plausible to understand corporate data — what it is, where it’s located, whether it’s accurate, who’s touched it, and how it’s distributed? Is it really possible to get a measurable and quantifiable view into the most valuable, yet today the most intangible, business asset?

Yes. Every business can do it through a concept called data health.

Data health is Talend’s vision for a holistic system of preventative measures, effective treatments, and a supportive culture to actively manage the well-being of corporate information. The system would include monitoring and reporting tools for helping organizations understand and communicate, in a quantifiable way, the overall reliability, risk, and return of an asset that’s essential to their viability.

In the future, the aim is for data health solutions to help create a universal set of metrics to evaluate the health of corporate data and establish it as an essential indicator of the overall strength of a business.

For too long we’ve treated data as simple, concrete units: cells on a spreadsheet, fields in a database — passive digital objects waiting for an analyst. But that’s no longer a sufficient model. Data is a complex, constantly changing organism. New inputs flow in and out, updated by users and transformed by shifting contexts. Those inputs and actions both provide an opportunity to learn about and change the value of the data itself. To truly understand what our data means, we need a more responsible, holistic view of that data.

Data is complex, and every organization has its unique requirements, regulations, and risk tolerance. This is why we imagine data health as a journey. Just like human health, data health would be different for companies of every age, life stage, and maturity level.

Our initial framework imagines three areas for companies to focus on as they begin the journey to establish data health: 

• Preventative measures — preemptively identifying and resolving data challenges
• Effective treatments — systematically improving data reliability and reducing risk
• Supportive culture — establishing an organizational discipline around data care and maintenance

Overseeing all of these focus areas is a comprehensive system of proactive monitoring and reporting to indicate success in achieving your data’s well-being. The combination of technologies and cultural practices that form this system will be unique to every organization, but the standards applied will be universal.

A vision for a better future

We believe there will come a time in the not-too-distant future where we’ll look back and wonder how we ever functioned in business or as a broader society, without a quantifiable way to measure the reliability, risk, and return of an asset so critical to our success. The risks of compromised data — and opportunities for innovation — are just too great. 

In 2019, Vyaire Medical, a global respiratory care company, kicked off a digital transformation initiative. Like many companies, their data infrastructure was a patchwork of one-off solutions and inefficient structures, including 12 enterprise planning systems, meaning that employees had to collect data on parts location, production, factory efficiency, and more from wherever they could. Decision-makers often received conflicting data depending on its source. This created confusion and made it difficult to make the fast, data-driven decisions necessary for the company to continue to thrive. There were so many design elements, top to bottom, that were never built to scale to the numbers we needed to scale to,” said Ed Rybicki, Vyaire’s global chief information officer. “So we really needed to rethink the whole thing.”

“Rethinking the whole thing” meant making some key infrastructure decisions — moving to a cloud infrastructure rather than remaining on-prem, building a centralized data repository that anyone in the company could access, and instituting data quality standards to ensure the data in the company-wide data lake is clean, accurate, and available in real-time. In short, they made the call to ensure healthy data to anyone who needed it for analysis and business decision-making. 

Vyaire’s wholesale transformation project proved extremely prescient; in 2020, COVID emerged, which meant there was more demand for their ventilators than ever before. “We had to replicate a highly customized manufacturing process for this line of ventilators,” said Rybicki. “It was probably 20 times beyond what had ever been done before, all in six or seven months. At the end of the day, we knew that if we weren’t able to scale up, it would mean that people who needed ventilators might not get them. We were able to scale up these old systems—and help save lives.”

For Vyaire, data health was no longer optional. It’s not something they could live without or could plan for in a year. Ensuring data health was what the business needed as soon as they could deliver it. Vyaire Medical’s experience is not a fluke. Because they made deliberate investments in the health of their data, they had complete clarity into their entire operation from the factory floor to the boardroom. They knew exactly what the capacity of each cog in their supply chain could be and what it should be. And that meant that they were able to answer the call of a lifetime — to meet the moment and produce the equipment that patients around the world desperately needed. Thanks to their data, Vyaire optimized their business and overcame the obstacles a global pandemic presented. Data health offers that exact type of clarity that you could have into your business.

No one should ever have to make decisions on information they can’t find, see, or understand. Data should not be a black box. the ultimate goal of creating a data health practice is to establish confidence and total visibility into your data, and therefore a real quantification of value. You should understand how data is working in every aspect of your business. You should be able to identify what data is doing for you. You should be able to establish an ROI for all your data investments. We believe that once you establish your company’s baselines for data health, it will become as indispensable as Google Maps — you won’t be able to imagine life without it.

The post Solving the Right Data Problem. Finally. appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Stonegate is Britain’s largest pub company, with 1,200 managed pubs and bars across the UK, 3,200 tenanted sites, and multiple brands including Slug & Lettuce, Yates, Be At One, Walkabout, and Popworld.

The hospitality business was difficult enough before COVID-19 arrived, but the pandemic forced Stonegate to fundamentally rethink its core business and operational models.

“The past year has been unbelievable,” said Baz Javanshiri, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Stonegate Pub Company. “Most of our pubs have been closed eight of the last twelve months. That means we’ve had to reinvent our decision-making process. What do you do when the rules are changing every day? What do you do when you suddenly have no history to compare against? We had to get proactive, become more agile, and figure out how we were going to make money today.”

“Instant insights we could trust”

The pandemic wasn’t the initial catalyst that sparked Stonegate to modernize its data integration and analytics capabilities — but COVID-19 made this transformation an urgent priority.

Stonegate had already embarked on a project to build an analytics center of excellence (CoE). Previously, management of transactional data had been outsourced, creating complexity and constraints on tools and reporting. The goal was to move data management in-house, integrate data from multiple sources, and get better, faster insights for optimizing operations.

“We needed instant insights we could trust,” said Javanshiri. “That’s the way to get business leaders on board, because they have to have confidence in your insights. And that meant we needed real-time, customizable reporting.”

Stonegate engaged with Talend to provide ETL (extract, transform, load) technology for data integration, and Talend recommended its partner Mphasis Datayltyx to support the implementation. The project had three key phases: migrate data in-house; implement more flexible, automated reporting capabilities; and train and upskill Stonegate’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team to be more self-sufficient.

Initially, things were going well. Talend and Datalytyx worked with a number of other trusted partners to bring the data back in-house, and Datalytyx created a prototype for generating daily sales reports in just 18 business days.

Then the pandemic hit. Most of the company’s employees were placed on furlough starting in March 2020, and all the priorities shifted.

“The data integration and analytics project continued because it was important, but the rules changed,” said Javanshiri. “Our insights needed to become more proactive, less prescriptive. We needed to stop looking a year ahead and start looking a day or a week ahead. But first, we needed to get everyone on the same page.”

Creating a data superhighway

Javanshiri understood that with so many partners, so many moving pieces, and so many changes, alignment among all parties was essential.

“I wanted to see common goals, a seamless way of working, and clarity about roles and how to support each other,” he said. “That is what our partnership with Talend really provided. They gave us the ability to collaboratively build a superhighway of data that converges our main data sources, with the flexibility to dabble and play around with new data sources quickly and with ease. They helped integrate not just our data but our partners and our people.”

The new focus was to complete a “control tower” project to transition to the new solution ahead of pubs reopening in July. The control tower would make it easier to manage and re-prioritize tasks and ultimately ensure the new breed of automated sales reports were created quicky and reliably.

“We needed to get moving,“ said Javanshiri. “It didn’t have to be perfect; we just had to get started and build the control tower incrementally. What I wanted from the team was a very basic sample of what we wanted to achieve, within two weeks, then we’d go from there. That timeframe came as a shock to the team. But once we started building, we were learning continuously and it got easier.”

Going granular — fast

The control tower project was completed in just three months, enabling Stonegate analysts to successfully query the first weekend’s trading data using the new system.

“We had to go to a granular level fast,” said Javanshiri. “What’s the profitability of our pubs by hour? What market trends are playing to our strengths right now? Which markets and locations might provide new opportunities?” With the new platform, Stonegate data scientists now have access to three years’ daily sales transactions, stock and inventory data and labor force data comprising more than 3.5 billion rows of data, growing by 500,000 rows per day.

According to Javanshiri, the new solution has made Stonegate both more flexible and more proactive: “We can be more flexible in how we use our data to generate new insights, to address market trends, and support better decision making. We can be more proactive in how we support the business, looking at operations in a wider context to identify new opportunities. And we can do it all in-house.”

Always a step ahead

“I’m very pleased we took on this project,” Javanshiri said, “because otherwise we’d have had a much more difficult 12 months. If we’d had to use the traditional way of extracting data, it would have been very slow and we’d have lost our agility through that first phase of lockdown.”

More importantly, Javanshiri added, the new solution helped Stonegate stay a step ahead of competitors in a very challenging period.

“If I’m speaking to investors and they look at our competitors’ performance during that period, we were by far the most effective company when it came to operating through the pandemic,” he said.

“We are now able to make decisions very quickly, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the data integration work we did. We would have had a lot less cash, we would have been less reactive to the government lockdown, and we’d have been worrying about keeping pace. The biggest win for us was being able to stay a step ahead of the competition, because there was market share to be won.”

Additional resources: webinar on-demand

The post Data insights made simple, flexible, and proactive? <br> Cheers to that. appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Talend is celebrating its 15^th anniversary this year. It’s a milestone we couldn’t have achieved without our customers, partners, and the heart and soul of Talend, our employees.

Fifteen years ago, French entrepreneurs, Fabrice Bonan and Bertrand Diard, set out in Suresnes, France, to make data access and management faster and better by democratizing technology.  With open source beginnings, Talend launched its first paid product in 2007 and the following year we debuted at an industry tradeshow in France.  One of our early employees shared an anecdote from that time where we had permitted a TV crew to recharge their camera battery at Talend’s first ever booth and as an unexpected thank you, we were featured on national television.  The rest is data history …

Today, Talend is a publicly traded company with offices throughout the world. Talend’s successes have not diminished the celebration of its roots; the company’s unique identity continues to reflect our European heritage.  Corporate headquarters are in Redwood City, CA, but we evoke a tangible coolness – a certain je ne sais quoi – that sets us apart from other Silicon Valley firms.  It is Talend’s incredible culture and work environment that stands out and it is what will propel the company forward. 

While data reigns supreme at Talend, hands down, it’s our employees who are the heart of this company.  Woven into the fabric of our culture is an emphasis on employee diversity, acceptance and inclusion of thought.  We ask our employees to bring their authentic self to the workplace, and this begins with me.  The value placed in honest conversations help drive our highly engaged teams, and our willingness to grasp that mistakes may be made along the way sparks our innovative creativity.  Simply put, we hire and develop an incredibly talented group who work around the globe on a common vision, and we show up for our customers and for each other.

The commitment to our customers is evident through the years. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Dominos and L’Oréal continue to rely on Talend as a strategic partner to help run their business on trusted data. They get the data they need to design exceptional customer experiences, improve operations, ensure compliance, and drive innovation.  Our ability to meet customers where they are on their data journey is unique to Talend. We help our customers digitally transform to answer questions and power innovation to gain a competitive edge and achieve what they never thought possible.

At this fifteen-year mark, I know it’s the strength of our people and obsession with supporting companies around the globe that will drive us to evolve as a company. We are laying the foundation for accelerated growth and scale. Our purpose is to change the way the world makes decisions and we do that by making data useful for all organizations in any stage of their digital transformation.

Thank you to everyone in our extended Talend community who has contributed to our success.  My own journey here at Talend has just begun.  Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity to learn from employees, partners, and customers.  I have experienced and understand why people choose to work with Talend.  There is passion, pride, and energy in our culture that permeates throughout our organization and I am thrilled to lead Talend to the next level.

Happy 15^th anniversary, Talend!

The post Talend at 15 – Continuing to take the work out of working with data appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Stonegate is Britain’s largest pub company, with 1,200 managed pubs and bars across the UK, 3,200 tenanted sites, and multiple brands including Slug & Lettuce, Yates, Be At One, Walkabout, and Popworld.

The hospitality business was difficult enough before COVID-19 arrived, but the pandemic forced Stonegate to fundamentally rethink its core business and operational models.

“The past year has been unbelievable,” said Baz Javanshiri, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Stonegate Pub Company. “Most of our pubs have been closed eight of the last twelve months. That means we’ve had to reinvent our decision-making process. What do you do when the rules are changing every day? What do you do when you suddenly have no history to compare against? We had to get proactive, become more agile, and figure out how we were going to make money today.”

“Instant insights we could trust”

The pandemic wasn’t the initial catalyst that sparked Stonegate to modernize its data integration and analytics capabilities — but COVID-19 made this transformation an urgent priority.

Stonegate had already embarked on a project to build an analytics center of excellence (CoE). Previously, management of transactional data had been outsourced, creating complexity and constraints on tools and reporting. The goal was to move data management in-house, integrate data from multiple sources, and get better, faster insights for optimizing operations.

“We needed instant insights we could trust,” said Javanshiri. “That’s the way to get business leaders on board, because they have to have confidence in your insights. And that meant we needed real-time, customizable reporting.”

Stonegate engaged with Talend to provide ETL (extract, transform, load) technology for data integration, and Talend recommended its partner Mphasis Datayltyx to support the implementation. The project had three key phases: migrate data in-house; implement more flexible, automated reporting capabilities; and train and upskill Stonegate’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team to be more self-sufficient.

Initially, things were going well. Talend and Datalytyx worked with a number of other trusted partners to bring the data back in-house, and Datalytyx created a prototype for generating daily sales reports in just 18 business days.

Then the pandemic hit. Most of the company’s employees were placed on furlough starting in March 2020, and all the priorities shifted.

“The data integration and analytics project continued because it was important, but the rules changed,” said Javanshiri. “Our insights needed to become more proactive, less prescriptive. We needed to stop looking a year ahead and start looking a day or a week ahead. But first, we needed to get everyone on the same page.”

Creating a data superhighway

Javanshiri understood that with so many partners, so many moving pieces, and so many changes, alignment among all parties was essential.

“I wanted to see common goals, a seamless way of working, and clarity about roles and how to support each other,” he said. “That is what our partnership with Talend really provided. They gave us the ability to collaboratively build a superhighway of data that converges our main data sources, with the flexibility to dabble and play around with new data sources quickly and with ease. They helped integrate not just our data but our partners and our people.”

The new focus was to complete a “control tower” project to transition to the new solution ahead of pubs reopening in July. The control tower would make it easier to manage and re-prioritize tasks and ultimately ensure the new breed of automated sales reports were created quicky and reliably.

“We needed to get moving,“ said Javanshiri. “It didn’t have to be perfect; we just had to get started and build the control tower incrementally. What I wanted from the team was a very basic sample of what we wanted to achieve, within two weeks, then we’d go from there. That timeframe came as a shock to the team. But once we started building, we were learning continuously and it got easier.”

Going granular — fast

The control tower project was completed in just three months, enabling Stonegate analysts to successfully query the first weekend’s trading data using the new system.

“We had to go to a granular level fast,” said Javanshiri. “What’s the profitability of our pubs by hour? What market trends are playing to our strengths right now? Which markets and locations might provide new opportunities?” With the new platform, Stonegate data scientists now have access to three years’ daily sales transactions, stock and inventory data and labor force data comprising more than 3.5 billion rows of data, growing by 500,000 rows per day.

According to Javanshiri, the new solution has made Stonegate both more flexible and more proactive: “We can be more flexible in how we use our data to generate new insights, to address market trends, and support better decision making. We can be more proactive in how we support the business, looking at operations in a wider context to identify new opportunities. And we can do it all in-house.”

Always a step ahead

“I’m very pleased we took on this project,” Javanshiri said, “because otherwise we’d have had a much more difficult 12 months. If we’d had to use the traditional way of extracting data, it would have been very slow and we’d have lost our agility through that first phase of lockdown.”

More importantly, Javanshiri added, the new solution helped Stonegate stay a step ahead of competitors in a very challenging period.

“If I’m speaking to investors and they look at our competitors’ performance during that period, we were by far the most effective company when it came to operating through the pandemic,” he said.

“We are now able to make decisions very quickly, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the data integration work we did. We would have had a lot less cash, we would have been less reactive to the government lockdown, and we’d have been worrying about keeping pace. The biggest win for us was being able to stay a step ahead of the competition, because there was market share to be won.”

Additional resources: webinar on-demand

The post Data insights made simple, flexible, and proactive? <br> Cheers to that. appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Talend is celebrating its 15^th anniversary this year. It’s a milestone we couldn’t have achieved without our customers, partners, and the heart and soul of Talend, our employees.

Fifteen years ago, French entrepreneurs, Fabrice Bonan and Bertrand Diard, set out in Suresnes, France, to make data access and management faster and better by democratizing technology.  With open source beginnings, Talend launched its first paid product in 2007 and the following year we debuted at an industry tradeshow in France.  One of our early employees shared an anecdote from that time where we had permitted a TV crew to recharge their camera battery at Talend’s first ever booth and as an unexpected thank you, we were featured on national television.  The rest is data history …

Today, Talend is a publicly traded company with offices throughout the world. Talend’s successes have not diminished the celebration of its roots; the company’s unique identity continues to reflect our European heritage.  Corporate headquarters are in Redwood City, CA, but we evoke a tangible coolness – a certain je ne sais quoi – that sets us apart from other Silicon Valley firms.  It is Talend’s incredible culture and work environment that stands out and it is what will propel the company forward. 

While data reigns supreme at Talend, hands down, it’s our employees who are the heart of this company.  Woven into the fabric of our culture is an emphasis on employee diversity, acceptance and inclusion of thought.  We ask our employees to bring their authentic self to the workplace, and this begins with me.  The value placed in honest conversations help drive our highly engaged teams, and our willingness to grasp that mistakes may be made along the way sparks our innovative creativity.  Simply put, we hire and develop an incredibly talented group who work around the globe on a common vision, and we show up for our customers and for each other.

The commitment to our customers is evident through the years. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Dominos and L’Oréal continue to rely on Talend as a strategic partner to help run their business on trusted data. They get the data they need to design exceptional customer experiences, improve operations, ensure compliance, and drive innovation.  Our ability to meet customers where they are on their data journey is unique to Talend. We help our customers digitally transform to answer questions and power innovation to gain a competitive edge and achieve what they never thought possible.

At this fifteen-year mark, I know it’s the strength of our people and obsession with supporting companies around the globe that will drive us to evolve as a company. We are laying the foundation for accelerated growth and scale. Our purpose is to change the way the world makes decisions and we do that by making data useful for all organizations in any stage of their digital transformation.

Thank you to everyone in our extended Talend community who has contributed to our success.  My own journey here at Talend has just begun.  Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity to learn from employees, partners, and customers.  I have experienced and understand why people choose to work with Talend.  There is passion, pride, and energy in our culture that permeates throughout our organization and I am thrilled to lead Talend to the next level.

Happy 15^th anniversary, Talend!

The post Talend at 15 – Continuing to take the work out of working with data appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Stonegate is Britain’s largest pub company, with 1,200 managed pubs and bars across the UK, 3,200 tenanted sites, and multiple brands including Slug & Lettuce, Yates, Be At One, Walkabout, and Popworld.

The hospitality business was difficult enough before COVID-19 arrived, but the pandemic forced Stonegate to fundamentally rethink its core business and operational models.

“The past year has been unbelievable,” said Baz Javanshiri, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Stonegate Pub Company. “Most of our pubs have been closed eight of the last twelve months. That means we’ve had to reinvent our decision-making process. What do you do when the rules are changing every day? What do you do when you suddenly have no history to compare against? We had to get proactive, become more agile, and figure out how we were going to make money today.”

“Instant insights we could trust”

The pandemic wasn’t the initial catalyst that sparked Stonegate to modernize its data integration and analytics capabilities — but COVID-19 made this transformation an urgent priority.

Stonegate had already embarked on a project to build an analytics center of excellence (CoE). Previously, management of transactional data had been outsourced, creating complexity and constraints on tools and reporting. The goal was to move data management in-house, integrate data from multiple sources, and get better, faster insights for optimizing operations.

“We needed instant insights we could trust,” said Javanshiri. “That’s the way to get business leaders on board, because they have to have confidence in your insights. And that meant we needed real-time, customizable reporting.”

Stonegate engaged with Talend to provide ETL (extract, transform, load) technology for data integration, and Talend recommended its partner Mphasis Datayltyx to support the implementation. The project had three key phases: migrate data in-house; implement more flexible, automated reporting capabilities; and train and upskill Stonegate’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team to be more self-sufficient.

Initially, things were going well. Talend and Datalytyx worked with a number of other trusted partners to bring the data back in-house, and Datalytyx created a prototype for generating daily sales reports in just 18 business days.

Then the pandemic hit. Most of the company’s employees were placed on furlough starting in March 2020, and all the priorities shifted.

“The data integration and analytics project continued because it was important, but the rules changed,” said Javanshiri. “Our insights needed to become more proactive, less prescriptive. We needed to stop looking a year ahead and start looking a day or a week ahead. But first, we needed to get everyone on the same page.”

Creating a data superhighway

Javanshiri understood that with so many partners, so many moving pieces, and so many changes, alignment among all parties was essential.

“I wanted to see common goals, a seamless way of working, and clarity about roles and how to support each other,” he said. “That is what our partnership with Talend really provided. They gave us the ability to collaboratively build a superhighway of data that converges our main data sources, with the flexibility to dabble and play around with new data sources quickly and with ease. They helped integrate not just our data but our partners and our people.”

The new focus was to complete a “control tower” project to transition to the new solution ahead of pubs reopening in July. The control tower would make it easier to manage and re-prioritize tasks and ultimately ensure the new breed of automated sales reports were created quicky and reliably.

“We needed to get moving,“ said Javanshiri. “It didn’t have to be perfect; we just had to get started and build the control tower incrementally. What I wanted from the team was a very basic sample of what we wanted to achieve, within two weeks, then we’d go from there. That timeframe came as a shock to the team. But once we started building, we were learning continuously and it got easier.”

Going granular — fast

The control tower project was completed in just three months, enabling Stonegate analysts to successfully query the first weekend’s trading data using the new system.

“We had to go to a granular level fast,” said Javanshiri. “What’s the profitability of our pubs by hour? What market trends are playing to our strengths right now? Which markets and locations might provide new opportunities?” With the new platform, Stonegate data scientists now have access to three years’ daily sales transactions, stock and inventory data and labor force data comprising more than 3.5 billion rows of data, growing by 500,000 rows per day.

According to Javanshiri, the new solution has made Stonegate both more flexible and more proactive: “We can be more flexible in how we use our data to generate new insights, to address market trends, and support better decision making. We can be more proactive in how we support the business, looking at operations in a wider context to identify new opportunities. And we can do it all in-house.”

Always a step ahead

“I’m very pleased we took on this project,” Javanshiri said, “because otherwise we’d have had a much more difficult 12 months. If we’d had to use the traditional way of extracting data, it would have been very slow and we’d have lost our agility through that first phase of lockdown.”

More importantly, Javanshiri added, the new solution helped Stonegate stay a step ahead of competitors in a very challenging period.

“If I’m speaking to investors and they look at our competitors’ performance during that period, we were by far the most effective company when it came to operating through the pandemic,” he said.

“We are now able to make decisions very quickly, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the data integration work we did. We would have had a lot less cash, we would have been less reactive to the government lockdown, and we’d have been worrying about keeping pace. The biggest win for us was being able to stay a step ahead of the competition, because there was market share to be won.”

Additional resources: webinar on-demand

The post Data insights made simple, flexible, and proactive? <br> Cheers to that. appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Talend is celebrating its 15^th anniversary this year. It’s a milestone we couldn’t have achieved without our customers, partners, and the heart and soul of Talend, our employees.

Fifteen years ago, French entrepreneurs, Fabrice Bonan and Bertrand Diard, set out in Suresnes, France, to make data access and management faster and better by democratizing technology.  With open source beginnings, Talend launched its first paid product in 2007 and the following year we debuted at an industry tradeshow in France.  One of our early employees shared an anecdote from that time where we had permitted a TV crew to recharge their camera battery at Talend’s first ever booth and as an unexpected thank you, we were featured on national television.  The rest is data history …

Today, Talend is a publicly traded company with offices throughout the world. Talend’s successes have not diminished the celebration of its roots; the company’s unique identity continues to reflect our European heritage.  Corporate headquarters are in Redwood City, CA, but we evoke a tangible coolness – a certain je ne sais quoi – that sets us apart from other Silicon Valley firms.  It is Talend’s incredible culture and work environment that stands out and it is what will propel the company forward. 

While data reigns supreme at Talend, hands down, it’s our employees who are the heart of this company.  Woven into the fabric of our culture is an emphasis on employee diversity, acceptance and inclusion of thought.  We ask our employees to bring their authentic self to the workplace, and this begins with me.  The value placed in honest conversations help drive our highly engaged teams, and our willingness to grasp that mistakes may be made along the way sparks our innovative creativity.  Simply put, we hire and develop an incredibly talented group who work around the globe on a common vision, and we show up for our customers and for each other.

The commitment to our customers is evident through the years. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Dominos and L’Oréal continue to rely on Talend as a strategic partner to help run their business on trusted data. They get the data they need to design exceptional customer experiences, improve operations, ensure compliance, and drive innovation.  Our ability to meet customers where they are on their data journey is unique to Talend. We help our customers digitally transform to answer questions and power innovation to gain a competitive edge and achieve what they never thought possible.

At this fifteen-year mark, I know it’s the strength of our people and obsession with supporting companies around the globe that will drive us to evolve as a company. We are laying the foundation for accelerated growth and scale. Our purpose is to change the way the world makes decisions and we do that by making data useful for all organizations in any stage of their digital transformation.

Thank you to everyone in our extended Talend community who has contributed to our success.  My own journey here at Talend has just begun.  Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity to learn from employees, partners, and customers.  I have experienced and understand why people choose to work with Talend.  There is passion, pride, and energy in our culture that permeates throughout our organization and I am thrilled to lead Talend to the next level.

Happy 15^th anniversary, Talend!

The post Talend at 15 – Continuing to take the work out of working with data appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.

Stonegate is Britain’s largest pub company, with 1,200 managed pubs and bars across the UK, 3,200 tenanted sites, and multiple brands including Slug & Lettuce, Yates, Be At One, Walkabout, and Popworld.

The hospitality business was difficult enough before COVID-19 arrived, but the pandemic forced Stonegate to fundamentally rethink its core business and operational models.

“The past year has been unbelievable,” said Baz Javanshiri, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Stonegate Pub Company. “Most of our pubs have been closed eight of the last twelve months. That means we’ve had to reinvent our decision-making process. What do you do when the rules are changing every day? What do you do when you suddenly have no history to compare against? We had to get proactive, become more agile, and figure out how we were going to make money today.”

“Instant insights we could trust”

The pandemic wasn’t the initial catalyst that sparked Stonegate to modernize its data integration and analytics capabilities — but COVID-19 made this transformation an urgent priority.

Stonegate had already embarked on a project to build an analytics center of excellence (CoE). Previously, management of transactional data had been outsourced, creating complexity and constraints on tools and reporting. The goal was to move data management in-house, integrate data from multiple sources, and get better, faster insights for optimizing operations.

“We needed instant insights we could trust,” said Javanshiri. “That’s the way to get business leaders on board, because they have to have confidence in your insights. And that meant we needed real-time, customizable reporting.”

Stonegate engaged with Talend to provide ETL (extract, transform, load) technology for data integration, and Talend recommended its partner Mphasis Datayltyx to support the implementation. The project had three key phases: migrate data in-house; implement more flexible, automated reporting capabilities; and train and upskill Stonegate’s Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) team to be more self-sufficient.

Initially, things were going well. Talend and Datalytyx worked with a number of other trusted partners to bring the data back in-house, and Datalytyx created a prototype for generating daily sales reports in just 18 business days.

Then the pandemic hit. Most of the company’s employees were placed on furlough starting in March 2020, and all the priorities shifted.

“The data integration and analytics project continued because it was important, but the rules changed,” said Javanshiri. “Our insights needed to become more proactive, less prescriptive. We needed to stop looking a year ahead and start looking a day or a week ahead. But first, we needed to get everyone on the same page.”

Creating a data superhighway

Javanshiri understood that with so many partners, so many moving pieces, and so many changes, alignment among all parties was essential.

“I wanted to see common goals, a seamless way of working, and clarity about roles and how to support each other,” he said. “That is what our partnership with Talend really provided. They gave us the ability to collaboratively build a superhighway of data that converges our main data sources, with the flexibility to dabble and play around with new data sources quickly and with ease. They helped integrate not just our data but our partners and our people.”

The new focus was to complete a “control tower” project to transition to the new solution ahead of pubs reopening in July. The control tower would make it easier to manage and re-prioritize tasks and ultimately ensure the new breed of automated sales reports were created quicky and reliably.

“We needed to get moving,“ said Javanshiri. “It didn’t have to be perfect; we just had to get started and build the control tower incrementally. What I wanted from the team was a very basic sample of what we wanted to achieve, within two weeks, then we’d go from there. That timeframe came as a shock to the team. But once we started building, we were learning continuously and it got easier.”

Going granular — fast

The control tower project was completed in just three months, enabling Stonegate analysts to successfully query the first weekend’s trading data using the new system.

“We had to go to a granular level fast,” said Javanshiri. “What’s the profitability of our pubs by hour? What market trends are playing to our strengths right now? Which markets and locations might provide new opportunities?” With the new platform, Stonegate data scientists now have access to three years’ daily sales transactions, stock and inventory data and labor force data comprising more than 3.5 billion rows of data, growing by 500,000 rows per day.

According to Javanshiri, the new solution has made Stonegate both more flexible and more proactive: “We can be more flexible in how we use our data to generate new insights, to address market trends, and support better decision making. We can be more proactive in how we support the business, looking at operations in a wider context to identify new opportunities. And we can do it all in-house.”

Always a step ahead

“I’m very pleased we took on this project,” Javanshiri said, “because otherwise we’d have had a much more difficult 12 months. If we’d had to use the traditional way of extracting data, it would have been very slow and we’d have lost our agility through that first phase of lockdown.”

More importantly, Javanshiri added, the new solution helped Stonegate stay a step ahead of competitors in a very challenging period.

“If I’m speaking to investors and they look at our competitors’ performance during that period, we were by far the most effective company when it came to operating through the pandemic,” he said.

“We are now able to make decisions very quickly, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without the data integration work we did. We would have had a lot less cash, we would have been less reactive to the government lockdown, and we’d have been worrying about keeping pace. The biggest win for us was being able to stay a step ahead of the competition, because there was market share to be won.”

Additional resources: webinar on-demand

The post Data insights made simple, flexible, and proactive? <br> Cheers to that. appeared first on Talend Real-Time Open Source Data Integration Software.