Talend Acquisition Targets Data Replication Speeds

Data management and integration provider Talend announced the acquisition of Gamma Soft, a provider of change data capture (CDC) technology that Talend believes will help it meet its customers’ need for ever greater speed in data and analytics.

Two forces have been driving the need for this CDC technology and other enhancements to data management platforms -- growing volumes of data and customer demands for closer to real-time information.

“The rise of more heterogeneous data sources and a massive industry shift to cloud has created a need for real-time data replication” and CDC, says Jamie Fiorda, vice president of product marketing at Talend. “We are bringing together enterprise-grade CDC with our world-class data health solutions, enabling businesses to solve more use cases that require support for quickly changing data faster and easier.”

What is Change Data Capture?

Talend defines change data capture as an advanced technology for data replication and loading that reduces the time and resource costs of data warehousing programs and facilitates real-time data integration across the enterprise. It does this by detecting changed records in data sources in real time and applying them throughout the enterprise. This process streamlines required updates.

Fiorda explains that CDC monitors a source system for changes. When those changes are made it makes a small movement of data over to the data delivery destination.

This benefits organizations that are using cloud-based solutions, because instead of moving an entire database, there’s less to move so there’s less cloud consumption. That saves on cloud costs and provides higher performance, Fiorda says.

“You are able to move smaller amounts of data in a very fast way,” he says.

Filling a gap

Talend’s technology portfolio so far has had limited functionality in real-time data replication, so the deal to buy Gamma Soft will fill a gap, Fiorda says.

“This strengthens our ability with an enterprise-grade proven capability,” he says. “Gamma Soft also has approximately 150 active deployments, and we have several joint customers.”

He noted that data replication such as CDC is in demand right now by customers because many are looking to migrate cloud data stores for analytics, data science, and operational use cases.

Gartner cited “limited traction for data replication” as one of the “cautions” about Talend in the 2021 Magic Quadrant report for Data Integration. Talend is a “leader” in that data integration report, but Gartner noted that the company’s potential customers and even some existing customers didn’t understand Talend’s data replication existing capabilities and so they were evaluating competitors in order to gain data replication and CDC. The Gamma Soft acquisition is a step towards closing that gap with potential customers.

Benefits for Talend

Once the acquisition is complete, Fiorda says, the Gamma Soft technology will be available both as a standalone solution or as part of Talend’s unified end-to-end technology. Talend is targeting general availability by the third quarter of 2022.

The deal also provides a side benefit for Talend. At a time when many technology companies are struggling to hire enough talent, acquisitions can help fill talent gaps, too. For Talend, that means the company will be gaining additional talent where Gamma Soft is based in Paris.

“We are thrilled to welcome the talented Gamma Soft team to Talend,” said Christal Bemont, Talend CEO, in a statement announcing the deal.

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