Winter ’23: Accelerate time to value and data modernization efforts

We recognize that extracting the most return from your data isn’t always easy. In fact, for many organizations, it rarely is. 

According to a recent survey, 97% of respondents said they face challenges using data effectively. And NewVantage Partners found that only 24% of executives say their organizations are data-driven. 

There are simply too many data sources, too much data volume, and too few resources for these organizations to effectively manage the growing demand for trusted data. And that means little data — if any — can be relied upon to make critical business decisions. 

But fortunately, there’s a way out. 

At Talend, our goal is to help organizations of all sizes and across all industries drive value with modern data management. Talend’s modular solution enables teams to use a complete range of capabilities, including data integration, data quality and governance, and application and API integration. With Talend, users of various skill levels can help discover, transform, govern, and share data to effectively meet their business objectives.  

With our Winter ’23 launch, which will unveil new features over the next few months, our goal is to help you migrate to the cloud more easily and efficiently, connect to more data sources than ever before, and provide more ways to help you maximize your efficiency and minimize risk. Let’s dive in. 

Enhanced cloud management and simplified migration 

Cloud migration is becoming increasingly common among businesses, and more and more organizations are adopting cloud strategies to improve their agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. A 2021 IDG survey that included responses from 400 IT decision-makers across North America and Europe found that 59% of organizations had already moved some workloads to the cloud, and that 38% have a cloud-first or cloud-only strategy.  

Talend Cloud Management Console (TMC), the administration tool for planning, managing, and running cloud jobs and configuring projects, users, and user roles, sees several important enhancements. First, it streamlines cloud migrations by allowing Talend customers to automatically publish cloud-to-cloud and hybrid integration workflows created on-premises to a fully managed cloud platform.  

Because Talend users count on TMC to run millions of tasks essential to managing their business every month, we’ve introduced new capabilities to simplify and automate task scheduling and orchestration management. These Smart Services will help smooth operations, schedule tasks, and ensure the on-time delivery of data needed for reporting purposes. Additionally, with the new SCIM[1]-compatible user management API, you can provision and manage users with identity and access management systems like Okta or Azure, which will centralize your access management across your organization and help ensure compliance. 

Lastly, keeping up with Spark vendors, data platforms, and data teams can be very challenging, causing delays in new initiatives. As a result, we’ve doubled down on our Universal Spark initiative — which is a unique Talend capability — by offering support for new Spark releases. Now, if you’re a data engineer, you will be able to develop Spark jobs once and deploy them across any data platform, quickly switching the jobs to run on different Spark versions. This makes migrations more seamless, and you can leverage the newer powerful Spark features.

Improved connectivity for modernization 

Modern businesses need state-of-the-art connectivity solutions. We’re expanding our library of 1,000+ out-of-the-box connectors even further with the introduction of new or improved support for a wide range of data sources. This will bring certified connectors for business-critical apps such as SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Business Warehouse on HANA; ad platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter; and modern cloud databases, including Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), Azure SQL Database, Google Bigtable, and Neo4j Aura Cloud. We’ve also beefed up our support for streaming use cases with an enhanced Kafka connector, so you can benefit from working with Schema Registry from Confluent, the de-facto schema storage repository technology.   

Finally, we’re improving our SAP connectivity for business-critical apps with renewed SAP ECC certification, a new SAP S/4HANA certification, safer SAP transport, support for SAP CDS view, and support for SAP OData. 

With all these improvements, we are making it easier to connect to new data sources and take advantage of the latest advances in modern data management. 

Greater efficiency and less risk 

To maximize efficiency across an organization, everybody — not just technical users — needs to be able to participate in organizational data management without relying on IT assistance every step of the way. That’s why we’re excited to announce new data observability capabilities with the Talend Data Console, available in Talend Data Inventory. The Data Console gives a holistic view of organizational data and allows data professionals to monitor the effectiveness of data programs and quality interventions: 

• Semantic data types or tags in the Data Console allow you to easily discover new datasets and uncover data blind spots. Additional filtering options include description, name, connection type, crawler, and quality score. 
• With Talend Trust Score™ capabilities in Data Console, you can quickly identify how qualified trust aspects of data have changed over time and which quality interventions have impacted the score, making it easy to stay on top of data drifts.
• Visibility into sharing policy helps you learn more about which datasets are shared with groups of individual users, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. 

In addition to the Data Console, we’re integrating data quality rules in Talend Data Inventory. Now, you can identify data quality issues earlier and act on them sooner. Combined with our latest observability capabilities, the impact of these rules can be tracked over time. You can also apply custom rules that bring more business context so that you can measure data quality in a more business-relevant way than with the standard technical metrics. Best of all, you can leverage pre-existing rules across Talend in the cloud. Rules can be designed once and reused anywhere across the cloud application, on any data, no matter its location and format. 

In other words, if you’re a data analyst or line-of-business user, now you can get access to high-quality, trusted data at your fingertips. And on top of these enhancements to Talend Data Fabric, we’re also introducing new ways for Stitch users to maximize efficiency and reduce risk, including: 

• Role-based access control, which provides greater security by enabling permissions set at an individual user level  
• Historical mode, which gives users the ability to track changes as version records in Snowflake or Amazon Redshift for future analysis or auditing purposes 
• Data observability capabilities, which offer data pipeline monitoring for ingestion metrics such as data volume, data freshness, and schema changes 

Accelerate time to value with Talend 

 We’ve covered a lot of improvements coming in the next few months. To make sure everyone gets the full value out of these and other capabilities in Talend Data Fabric, our Professional Services team is rolling out new assets such as best practices, frameworks, toolkits, solution templates, and guides that can fast-track your implementation by focusing on use cases at scale.  Along with the enhancements introduced as part of the Winter ’23 release, these resources will put our customers in the best position to accelerate their journey with Talend and achieve business outcomes faster. 

Over the coming months, we’ll cover more specifics about all the possibilities these features will unlock, and explore more ways they can help you accelerate time to value and data modernization at your organization. In the meantime, we’ll update our release notes as features become available. 

If you’re a current Talend customer, we encourage you to reach out to your rep for more information on these new features and find out how you can take advantage of them in your Talend implementation. And if you haven’t tried Talend yet, there’s never been a better time! You can book a demo with one of our experts at https://www.talend.com/request-demo/

[1]SCIM stands for System for Cross-domain Identity Management