Talend iPaaS momentum grows. Talend recognized in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise iPaaS
By Talend Team
As organizations continue to embrace cloud-based computing as the cornerstone of their digital transformation, the integration platform as a service (iPaaS) has become a critical component of their integration environments. An iPaaS solution simplifies the integration of data, applications, and systems, whether in the cloud or on-premises, through unified support for API, application, data, and B2B integration styles.
We’ve seen this flexibility deliver real business benefits for customers, such as faster time to insight, lower expenses, and an accelerated pace of innovation. However, not all iPaaS solutions are the same.
Most solutions focus purely on the integration piece – moving data from point A to point B, and less on the integrity. But as that data moves among applications, systems, partners, and customers, the impact on that data’s health — negative or positive — increases exponentially. Without placing guardrails that ensure good data health throughout the integration process, unhealthy data multiplies and propagates across the business, making it impossible to make informed decisions and damaging customer relationships.
Improving on iPaaS to achieve healthier data
For data to be healthy, it must be continuously easy to discover, understand, and use. An iPaaS can play a critical role in ensuring that all the data it touches is healthy and supports the organization and its objectives. iPaaS solutions excel in providing an easy-to-use platform for less-technical users, but the advanced controls needed to stop unhealthy data require a level of expertise and understanding that is often beyond those users’ skillsets. That’s where built-in, automated data quality features like those found in Talend Data Fabric come in. They allow less-technical users to take advantage of the full scope of the iPaaS’s capabilities while drastically lowering the risk of unhealthy data spreading throughout the organization.
We believe our unique, holistic approach to integration played a key role in our recognition as a Challenger in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise iPaaS for the second year in a row. We were recognized in the Magic Quadrant last year, and we noted that our iPaaS capabilities were being consumed faster than any integration technology we can remember. This trend has only continued over the past year, with cloud revenue doubling and the number of Application and API Integration users nearly doubling. And with those increases have come inspiring stories from customers who deploy and work with an iPaaS at scale about how healthy data helped propel their businesses to new heights.
Building connections between families, daycare centers, and data
Babilou Family Group is one of the largest international networks of corporate daycare centers, with over 2,100 childcare facilities worldwide. The company was always data driven, but it identified the need to simplify its data processes so it could shift a greater focus where it belongs: on the children and families it serves. With Talend, Babilou Family transformed how it treats data across its operations.
In just six months, the organization was able to create a parent space on its French website which it uses to manage all communications between parents and daycare centers to broaden its connection to families. Today, a parent looking for daycare can apply through multiple channels, such as the company’s website. “Thanks to the APIs and the web services, we are offering new ways to submit daycare enrollment applications and have seen a 60% increase in the number of such applications received,” says Florian Petitjean, Babilou Family’s Head of Data Flow Architecture.
“APIs with Talend allow us to simplify and speed up all of our processes, putting all our energy into the service of children’s education and development.”
– Benoit Lamezec, Chief Digital Officer, Babilou Family Group
Babilou Family also uses APIs for B2B use cases, such as connecting information systems to its international network of daycare centers. “We are both an operator with 800 daycare centers that we own ourselves and a distributor with a partner network of 1,300 independently owned centers, which currently account for 50% of our business and present new data interchange and analysis needs,” notes Benoit Lamezec, Babilou Family’s Chief Digital Officer.
“Any time a new partner joins our network, we can very quickly hook this partner up to our IT group using this plug-and-play mechanism, capture its data, and offer it turnkey business management tools,” adds Petitjean.
With Talend’s unified platform for API services, real-time processing, batch integration, and data synchronization – both on-premises and in the cloud – Babilou Family had the flexibility it needed to completely change the way it works with data. Transforming all processes to digital through web services simplifies what parents have to do. It also makes life easier for daycare center directors and employees by freeing them from time-consuming administrative tasks and allowing them to focus on their primary job of spending quality time with the children.
“With Talend, meeting the demands of the business is no longer a problem,” says Lamezec. “This way, we can concentrate on service quality. And this is, indeed, what our project is all about: offering families, employees, and our partners services that make their lives easier.”
Babilou Family is just one of many success stories we’ve heard from our customers across all industries about the substantial, tangible benefits that an advanced iPaaS solution brings. We’ve heard it from The Chronicle of Higher Education, who replaced its legacy system with a cloud-based microservices and data hub platform, built on Talend and AWS. That implementation led to a 50% reduction in time to market for new subscription services and delivered a futureproof, scalable architecture and cloud-agnostic framework with predictable and manageable IT costs. We’ve heard it from Lenovo, who used Talend to build a hybrid-cloud platform for analytics that delivers a 10X return on investment and helped lead to 11% revenue growth for each retail business unit. And we’ve heard it from AstraZeneca, who uses Talend Data Fabric’s iPaaS capabilities to deliver healthy data that has saved the company countless hours during the drug development cycle. The company can save $1 billion annually by shaving just 1 month off each clinical trial.
Looking to the future
When we hear about all the amazing things our customers are doing, it’s hard not to be inspired. At Talend, we’re fully convinced that achieving healthy data is the key to unlocking every organization’s full potential, and we’re committed to finding new ways to make the journey to healthy data even easier for our customers. This summer, we announced the launch of our self-service API Portal, which provides a central listing of APIs and documentation. The portal makes sharing APIs, documentation, and data structures across teams a breeze, supports the auto-generation of documentation, and boosts API adoption by making APIs easy to find, understand, and try.
And we’re just getting started. As we look to the future, we’re excited about upcoming releases that will support iPaaS use cases and customers in new ways, and we invite you to join us on this journey.