Data integration key to smart nation vision: Talend

Singapore

SINGAPORE'S Smart Nation vision is fundamentally about data integration, says Mike Tuchen, a former Microsoft executive and now the CEO of data software company Talend.

"Smarting up" a nation boils down to using technology to build an ecosystem where data is gathered on different sensors island-wide - on the roads, round the street corners, on moving vehicles, in gas and water pipelines - and then integrated, cleaned up, and analysed to enable people to make useful decisions.

Talend is an open-core data integration platform that helps organisations integrate data into a "a single version of the truth".

In the real world where data is a mess, gathered from different systems, in different file formats, with inconsistencies within itself, data integration is key in order to fully exploit the data collected.

In fact, Mr Tuchen calls it "the hard part, the heavylifting before you can take full advantage of the data".

Talend's business model is such that it offers open source software free for developers to download, but also proprietary software for organisations to use commercially at scale to solve advanced problems.

Its customers tend to be in the financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and telecommunications sectors.

So, for instance, in the telco sector, it would collect huge volumes of call data records and use the information for a number of purposes. Billing is one. The frequency of calls being dropped in a particular area is another; it would indicate the quality of the network.

Mr Tuchen mentioned Singapore's Smart Nation initiative because the company is also involved in the training of local professionals in preparation for that not-too-distant vision.

According to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, another 15,000 specialists may be required by 2016 in fields such as cyber security, data analytics and application development. This means that Singapore may be short of nearly 30,000 IT professionals.

To tackle this massive skillset gap, data management and analytics firm Cloudera is leading an initiative to help groom a future workforce of data professionals in Singapore. Talend is part of this consortium which also includes ST Engineering, Intel, Fusionex, and Dell. "What we did is, the major big leaders in the big data space all got together and created a unified set of training materials that allow people to ramp up on the whole package of everything they need to know end-to-end about big data," he says.

Talend, founded in 2005, only opened its Singapore office - also its Asia Pacific headquarters - in April this year. It is now looking at aggressive expansion to serve the demand for its services in this region.

"Globally, we were in seven countries last year, 15 countries this year, and will anticipate being in 25 countries next year.

"We are at less than 10 employees in Singapore now, but we are literally going to double the staff here in the next three months. We are hiring just about as fast as we can now," Mr Tuchen says.

Talend also has staff and partners in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. It also has about 100 employees in China, mostly providing engineering support, although it will only formally enter China in 2017. Right now, its attention is trained on expanding into India by the end of this year.

Some 30-40 per cent of Talend's business in Asia-Pacific comes from India, even though the company has no sales and marketing presence there.

"People are calling us up asking how to subscribe to our services. It's a wonderful thing . . . We have been very very popular in India, as it turns out," Mr Tuchen says.

On the free side of its open source model, India is also the third biggest country in the volume of downloads. US is first, but that is to be expected, given the company's headquarter is in Redwood City, California.

The reason for Talend's popularity in India could be because the adoption of open source software in India is very high and the country is very strong in software and engineering talent.

Many IT firms like Cisco and Tata Consultancy Services have their solution design and engineering excellence centres built in India. Talend's customers, General Electric and Citibank, also have their research and development teams located offshore there.

Mr Tuchen says the company has turned to the Asia Pacific region now because the price sensitivity of customers here act in its favour.

Talend's software is supposed to be three to five times cheaper than its legacy competitors. It only charges customers based on what they need, whereas its competitors charge for capacity.

Talend is also part of the disruption of the data management business, as traditional databases like IBM DB2 slowly get replaced by big data platforms such as Hadoop.

Now, legacy data integration software vendors like Informatica, Oracle and SAP, are being supplanted by newer software solutions from vendors like Talend.

Talend's software also runs five to 10 times faster because it was built to run natively on Hadoop and Apache Spark - computing frameworks that support the processing of large data sets.

"Companies over the next 20 years will be moving, in fact are already moving, from the old stack to new stack. And as they make that transition, we offer something much more effective in performance and cost," Mr Tuchen says.

He admits that Talend is still a distant competitor that will take time to catch up with the incumbent giants: "We are still eating their lunch, but we have years to go."

Various media reports say Talend may go public in the coming months, having hired investment banks and made a stealth filing for an initial public offering, but Mr Tuchen is tight-lipped on the matter.