Talend Unifies ESB, Data Management for End-to-End Data Services 
Open source firm Talend is offering a unified data services platform that combines data management and an ESB. Talend seeks to offer a common environment where data and integration experts can develop, validate, deploy and manage end-to-end data services.
Open source firm Talend is offering a unified data services platform that combines data management and an ESB. Talend seeks to offer a common environment where data and integration experts can develop, validate, deploy and manage end-to-end data services.
Talend’s new unified platform combines Talend’s data quality and MDM (master data management) with its new ESB Standard Edition, based on Apache Camel. Both use a common metadata repository and offer common design time and runtime tools for
- GUI-based development
- Deployment mechanism and runtime environment for operations
- Monitoring console for management
Talend wants to make it easier to synchronize data between operational applications, departmental silos and enterprise boundaries, Pat Walsh, Talend’s vice president of marketing told IDN. “There is an explosion of data, and so there is a need at the backend to better reuse and access that data in a secure manner,” Walsh said. “We let customers do that and also help them make sure they have clean data that they can package up and construct as a service.”
“Having an ESB with data management allows us to help companies quickly deliver data services, using technologies that let IT easily develop, deploy and manage them,” Ciaran Dynes, Talend’s senior director of product management told IDN. SOA success is an incremental approach. A lot of [early] success came from the ability to create and store services. Now, we see the next step will be data services management.”
Benefits, Architecture of Talend’s Unified Platform for Data Services
Architecturally, Talend’s approach provides two key capabilities for end-to-end data services: (1) unbundling data processes tied to applications, and (2) making processes reusable and manageable by converting them into standards-based data services via SOA.
Talend’s unified data/ESB platform is architected to provide key data-oriented services, Dynes said, including:
- Data integration services to access to any data, stored anywhere whether on-premise or in the cloud using Talend’s connectors and advanced data transformation capabilities
- Data quality services to provide data cleansing, enrichment, validation and de-duplication capabilities to any application
- Master data services to enable service-based access to a master data repository and allow any application to synchronize its master data via Talend ESB
To emphasize a lifecycle approach to data services, the company also provides common tooling. “Developing with data and ESB tools looks different to individual developers. However, enterprise architects think about both,” Walsh said. “We learned from them that to support data services we needed to expand and [embrace] the ESB side to make development less intimidating.”
Talend’s new ESB Standard Edition includes:
- Service Locator -- Provides automatic and transparent failover and load balancing between “service consumers” and “service providers” by allowing dynamic endpoint registration and lookup (via Apache Zookeeper).
- Service Activity Monitoring -- Facilitates the capture of analysis of service activity, including root cause analysis on service response times, traffic patterns and auditing.
- Security Token Service (STS) Framework -- Supports SAML 2.0 to federate security credentials during connections without the need for custom coding.
- Talend’s updated Data Management offering (v4.2) adds XML data mapping and transformation; dedicated entry and exit integrations to Talend ESB; and direct generation of “Talend Jobs” inside the Talend ESB,
- Talend ESB Standard Edition, Talend Open Studio, Talend Open Profiler and Talend MDM Community Edition are available immediately. They are provided under open source licenses. Commercial editions are also available.
