Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 1)

Yves de Montcheuil is the chief marketing officer of Talend, a company that provides data, application and business process integration solutions to organizations with the goal of leveraging their data assets. Yves has studied at the Grande Ecole des Sciences de l’Information et de l’Energie, commonly known as Supélec, and has more than 20 years of experience in corporate marketing, product marketing, and product management. In this interview he talks about Talend’s data integration solutions to help organizations leverage their data assets, providing a platform for those companies to specify their own parameters.

Sramana Mitra: Yves, let´s get to know Talend and you.

Yves de Montcheuil: I am the vice president for corporate marketing for Talend. I joined the company in its very early stages – I wasn’t there on day one, but on day two. The company had been in existence for a few months. It had already built a product and released the first version of the open source product, so the founders were at a stage where they wanted to build a business. They hired me to take care of building the marketing organization of Talend. At the same time they hired general managers to run the business operations both in EMEA and North America.

Talend has grown quite significantly since then. I am now in charge of corporate marketing. My challenge is to preach the good word about what we do and to convince people that Talend has the best technology and solution to help them solve their data problems.

SM: Take three customers of Talend and tell us what problems you are solving and what you bring to the table.

YM: What Talend does is help organizations extract value out of their data assets. There are many ways to do that. Probably one of the most important ways is to consolidate this information into a data warehouse for business intelligence. That was the genesis of Talend. Talend was founded as an alternative to the very expensive legacy proprietary vendors of ETL [extract, transform, load] in the 2000 decade. A lot of our customers were solving this problem early on. They were collecting data from multiple sources, whether those would be business applications such as SAP or salesforce.com, relational databases, flat files, etc. That has now expanded into big data sources and many other areas – transforming, cleansing, duplicating and enriching the data, populating the data warehouse to which BI applications could be plugged in to analyze and extract value on meaningful information.

That was the genesis of Talend. We have since expanded to other domains. One of the areas we found interesting and a logical continuity of the integration work we are doing is master data management – taking data beyond moving it between applications or databases, loading it onto data warehouses, but also ensuring the overall consistency of the information across different applications and databases, providing a single version of the truth. This is what master data management is all about. It is about building a set of golden records that can be then set back to all participant applications on systems to ensure everyone is getting access to the same valuable information.

Another enrichment we have provided to our product stack is the ability to augment the integration of data with the integration of application services on business processes. A lot of times, the issues that our customers are facing are a lot more complex than just moving data between applications. It is also invoking data processes; it is using web services, calling methods from applications to apply a specific set of business rules to some data sets.

In 2000 we acquired a company named Sopera. Sopera was a provider of enterprise service BUS technology, extremely useful for service-surrounded architecture of web services. We have been combining this technology with our data integration technology to provide what we call data services, which is the ability to combine the integration via data and via services.

That is the historical foundation on which we have developed the company. Of course, in the past few years there has been a big trend developing on the market, which is the democratization of data – making a lot more organizations aware of the potential of the data they had been amassing over the years and of the value they could get from this corporate asset. Talend has been investing a lot in supporting big data technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL, etc. to help organizations leverage not only the conventional data sources, but also to get access to all those untapped sources of data and provide organizations with the power to process, transform, and leverage this data without having to rely on extremely expensive and complicated platforms that have been the legacy of big data.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend
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