The creation of data is exploding at a rate that threatens to bury businesses that don’t have an adequate data strategy toward masses of structured and unstructured data.
With companies moving to take advantage with sensor data, under the name of the Internet of Things, there is more complexity than ever before, which might explain why businesses are looking to simplify with core strategic systems.
Mike Tuchen, CEO, Talend, told CBR that increasingly businesses are building ecosystems around a Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, or Marketo.
“There absolutely are these centre of mass ecosystems that people need to connect together and ecosystems that form around them,” said Tuchen.
This may not be a particularly new development when it comes to the CRM and ERP markets but it is also now something that is happening on the analytics side.
A decade ago the analytics side of the market may have seen a couple of major players like Teradata, or an Oracle/IBM data warehouse that customers used to put everything in to, but that has shifted.
Tuchen said: “Nowadays that market is shifting rapidly, more going to Hadoop and Spark and increasingly we are seeing interest in Amazon Web Services with their Redshift offerings and with Google with their Big Query and Google DataLab offerings, those are really the centre of mass systems are changing rapidly on the analytical side.”
As the shift takes place there still remains the need to connect it all together, which is where Talend comes in with its data integration, management, and cloud products.
Hybrid cloud is another trend that has been given a lot of air time, but for Tuchen this is to some extent still in its proof of concept phase.
“More broadly what I see customers want to do with an hybrid approach most of that today is about existing systems on premise connecting to things in the cloud, this concept of having true private clouds in the OpenStack like sense with AWS in public cloud is much a proof of concept level thing right now without really yet that broad mainstream adoption.
“I think it’s likely going to come but we are in very early days with that.”
Connecting existing systems to the cloud throws up some challenges such as getting the connectivity right, connecting through the firewall with the right level of bandwidth, and reliability to the public cloud is necessary to ensure good service.
Getting security right when going from one domain to another is another potential minefield, and then there is the complexity of different types of systems connecting and trying to get data integrity end to end.
In essence businesses are trying to maintain their legacy systems and adopt cloud a little.
Another common scenario that Tuchen identified is businesses that deal with seasonal spikes, such as a retailer, looking to deal with the burst in demand in a more flexible way.
This is why some are turning to the cloud to augment their on-premises solutions rather than replace, although that is also common.
The benefits of this is that a business can spin up a cloud server and spin it back down when it is no longer needed, which is much more cost effective than buying more systems and statically putting them in place with their on-premises system.
A desire for bursting capabilities isn’t the only path that businesses are taking as many are also moving wholesale to the cloud, which is something that Tuchen is seeing more frequently.
“This is something that our friends at Amazon have done a really nice job of evangelising , even just three years ago this concept of moving wholesale to the cloud wasn’t a mainstream concept, that was maybe some very early adopters but now AWS has shown a large amount of big companies looking to get out of data centres and into the cloud,” said Tuchen.
Talend isn’t watching this from the sidelines, with Tuchen saying that it is helping a large pharmaceutical company move its whole financial division to the cloud.
Another trend that the Talend CEO has identified is the increased demand for self service tools. These are tools that the business can use without having to pester IT for support, meaning that there isn’t necessarily the need for a software developer or a lengthy install process.
Although these tools may provide less functionality than an a larger software deployment, they allow the business person to easily clean and prepare the data so that it can be used with a tool such as Qlik or Tableau.
With the constant pace of innovation in the tech sector it can often be difficult for businesses to identify ones that they may be able to follow, Tuchen’s insights into the progression of hybrid cloud, the creation of centres of mass in the analytics industry and increased desire for self service analytics could make them ones to watch out for.
