Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double click into customer scenarios.

Yves de Montcheuil: On the MDM [master data management] front there is a global travel organization out of the UK. They are a global company with subsidiaries all over the world. They are a multi-channel organization by definition. They have big travel agencies. Those have big posters of sandy beaches, cruises, pictures, websites, corporate travel agents, corners in supermarkets, etc. So, they have many ways of selling their travel products. They have two big challenges. The first one is to know their customers. Through those multiple channels they want to get a single view of their customers. They want to know who is purchasing travels through which channels and make sure that each transaction is not viewed just as a separate transaction, but to know which channels each customer is coming back through, what their profile is, and how they like to travel, in order to market better to them. They are a very big organization, so it is quite a challenging project. They are operating in many countries and have many different systems. So, they need an MDM platform that is able to extract meaningful information from those sources and provide a single view of the customer.

Beyond the single view of the customer, there is also a very quick benefit, which is the ability to market additional services. When you go on a trip to Egypt and you buy the flight and the hotel room from this organization, to get there you are going to have many local operators who will sell you snorkeling trips, visits to the pyramids, visits to Cairo, etc. If they let their customers buy directly from those local providers, it is a missed revenue opportunity. Wouldn’t it be best for this global organization to sell to their customers in advance all the add-ons they are going to buy once they get to their destination? They can do that by knowing better who the customer is, what they typically consume once they are there, and more important, what the services are in that destination. When somebody is on a trip to the Red Sea in Egypt, it is not useful to try to sell them a ticket to the Alps. They are probably not going to buy it. You want to target the offerings specific to the period of the year, to the destination and the profile of the traveler. There is a big need behind understanding the customer, which is to maximize the revenue from this specific customer.

SM: What is the usage model you are assuming? I guess your customer has sold something to their customer and you are powering the analytics environment of that, including real-time analytics of where the customer is currently traveling?

YM: What Talend is selling to this customer is a software platform that enables our customer to build their MDM and their advanced analytics so that they can sell additional services to their customer. We don´t provide a turnkey analytics platform. We provide foundational software that lets our customer develop their analytics solutions.

SM: So you are selling a platform?

YM: Absolutely. Our platform is a bit different from the ones many other software providers offer. It is based on open source technology. This is how Talend made a difference in the beginning and is still making a difference. Our foundational technology is freely downloadable and usable and is used by many customers under the open source model. What we sell to organizations is an enterprise license, which is essentially a richer and more powerful version built on top of the open source software with value-added features for large deployment and development. We send that as an annual subscription license. This is a pricing model that is very predictable for the customer. It doesn’t imply any capital expenditure. Everything is operational expenditure, and this setup lets them customize the solution to what they actually need at any given time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Yves de Montcheuil, CMO of Talend
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