Talend, a provider of open source data management software, announced an upgrade to its flagship data management platform that incorporates advanced data stewardship and data matching capabilities. The new release, Talend v4.1, automates data quality processes and supports master data management (MDM) methodologies.
As an open source provider, Talend provides greater flexibility than comparable commercial offerings on the market, Jim Walker, MDM product marketing at Talend, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "First and foremost we are an open source solution so we provide access to data quality tools like no other company can. Our full-featured profiling tool is available for download off our website. This is no longer a black box proprietary solution. There is complete transparency into how the tools works. Finally, with open source comes a community of developers to extend and augment the product."
Talend v4.1 presents considerable advances for data stewardship. Data stewardship tools are used in data quality and master data management projects in order to resolve duplicate entities and improve the reusability and quality of corporate data; helping promote more efficient and streamlined business processes. "With the new stewardship capabilities in version 4.1 of Talend, we have really gone beyond what other vendors are offering for remediating data quality issues," Walker states. "We now bring powerful data stewardship capabilities that were once reserved for complex and expensive MDM projects to the data quality professional."
Walker says he sees a number of managers and professionals play the role of data steward among Talend customers. "Some organizations have teams that perform these functions while others are adopting these strategies for the first time. Ultimately, the requirements remain the same. The typical steward has business knowledge of the data as this is required in order to make decisions or take an assigned role in a process. This approach allows for proactive data governance and directly involves the business stakeholders."
The new data stewardship console in version 4.1 provides an intuitive record survivorship interface that enables a data steward to identify a set of attributes that comprise a master record from suspected duplicate records. The new solution also includes a task-based system to provide data stewards with simple tools to implement data quality improvements as they address inconsistencies or inaccuracies on single or multiple rows of data.
Version 4.1 also includes improvements to the upstream data matching capabilities for probabilistic matching and bucketing. These are intended to remove complexity from the design process and improve the accuracy and performance of the identification of unique and duplicated data. The match process is intended to speed implementation times and reduce complexity to enable resolution across any data not just people entities.
Talend provides both free downloadable solutions, as well as value-added premium offerings. Talend Open Studio, Talend Open Profiler and Talend MDM Community Edition are provided under the GPL license. Talend Integration Suite, Talend Data Quality and Talend MDM Enterprise Edition are provided under a subscription license. For more information, go here.