Qlik announced today it has completed the acquisition of Talend, the data integration and quality platform developer. The company said customers can expect a more comprehensive product offering, an enhancement to existing support and related services, and, further down the line, increased investment in research and development.
James Fisher, newly named chief strategy officer for the combined company, explained how the acquisition of Talend will bolster Qlik’s existing capabilities. “We’re obviously really excited to get the acquisition closed and to announce the news,” said Fisher. “I think what we’re really doing here is bringing together two recognized leaders in the data integration and the analytics space with a lot of complementary capabilities that really give us breadth and depth in terms of data integration, data quality, and data governance solutions.
“From a customer perspective, that will give both sets of customers access to an expanded, richer set of capabilities, enhanced support, additional services, and the benefit of increased investments in innovation and R&D.”
The combined entity helps customers address the widespread problem of data fragmentation, driven by thousands of sources and targets forcing them to choose from incomplete legacy software, cloud lock-in, or multiple disparate point products – all of which introduce additional costs and delay efforts to innovate.
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Strategic Alignment
Fisher explained how the acquisition supports Qlik’s three core operating principles:
- Being cloud-first but not cloud-only
- Working with customer data wherever that data resides
- Protecting customer investments
“They apply to everything we do organically and inorganically, and certainly in the context of this acquisition,” he said. “The goal for us, ultimately, is to deliver best-in-class capabilities in each functional area, in each capability domain, around data integration and data movement and make that seamlessly available from a single vendor by bringing the two companies together.”
“Those capabilities span everything we’ll do from connectivity, movement, and ingestion to the processing of data, quality, governance, API services, and the orchestration that comes with that.”
While these capabilities represent a data pipeline that operates independently of what Qlik provides from an analytics perspective, they will be available alongside Qlik’s technology, providing additional value to Qlik analytics customers.
Reducing Costs and Complexity
Another benefit of the acquisition to customers is a reduction in technical debt. Fisher said the combined solution will cut costs without adding complexity to the user experience. “One of the great combinations of what we bring together here is the combination of traditional ETL [extract, transform, and load] versus the more push-down transformational approach of ELT [extract, load, transform],” said Fisher. “The combination of Qlik and Talend will enable best-in-class services in each individual area that are available independently of one another but also available together as part of an integrated platform.”
“The long-term goal is to ensure that we can make these pieces accessible to customers such that they [benefit from the] extra value add of it all being available as part of a singular platform, whether that is on-premise or in the cloud, whether you want to run those analytics on-premise or in the cloud, whether you want those data integration jobs to be on-premise or in the cloud,” he said. “All of that is part of the vision and serves to drive down overall cost of ownership, the technical debt associated with that, and drive up the ability to deliver innovation and new capabilities to customers they can consume more seamlessly.”
Both Qlik and Talend users will continue to be able to consume these services on their existing platforms, Fisher said.
Customers can start taking advantage of the benefits of the acquisition immediately. At the recent QlikWorld 2023 Conference, the team demonstrated how Qlik and Talend work seamlessly alongside each other utilizing existing APIs.
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