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July 17, 2014

Talend’s ‘Sandbox’ Aims to Speed Big Data Projects

Data integration software vendor Talend said it hopes to speed the launch of new data projects with a preconfigured virtual platform it calls the “Big Data Sandbox.”

Talend, headquartered in Los Altos, Calif., and Suresnes, France, announced the availability of the virtual environment on July 16. The sandbox provides real-world use cases and interactive learning tools with the goal of getting big data projects off the ground faster.

The company noted the need for more big data automation tools as developers grow more expensive and harder to find. The sandbox is said to allow data integration developers to connect and manage a range of structured and unstructured data sources.

This can be done “without any MapReduce programming, using graphical Eclipse-based tools to generate optimized code,” Fabrice Bonan, Talend’s chief product officer and co-founder, noted in a statement.

Along with big data integration, the sandbox monitors data quality while integrating Hadoop. The package could save developers time otherwise spent on installation and configuration tasks along with building and integrating a big data prototype, Taland said.

Also included with the sandbox is a big data “cookbook” that includes tutorials and examples of existing big data platforms. The tutorials cover ETL (extract, transform and load) offloading along with analysis of clickstreams, Twitter sentiment and Apach weblogs.

The sandbox also provides developers with connectivity to data sources that include big data distributions and NoSQL.

Available immediately, Taland’s sandbox tool can be downloaded as a 30-day trial in a package that includes the company’s big data platform along with Cloudera, MapR and Hortonworks distributions of Hadoop. The big data cookbook is included in the download.

In June, Talend announced the latest release, version 5.5, of its integration platform designed to improve the performance and scalability of its Hadoop distribution.

Earlier this year, it rolled out a big data access tool with San Francisco-based partner Jaspersoft as part of a suite of big data reporting and analysis applications. The ETL analytics tool is based on Talend’s big data integration technology. The new tool supplements Jaspersoft’s existing native and data federation connectors for big data reporting and analytics.

Talend closed a $40 million investment round in December 2013 and is widely expected to launch and IPO in the near future.

The new funding round, which brings Talend’s funding total to $101.6 million, elevates Talend’s profile in the fast evolving world of integration where players like IBM, Oracle, TIBCO and SnapLogic are all making cases for their own offerings in the rising era of cloud, big data, and mobile computing.

CEO MikeTuchen said the company would attack the market by expanding its big data capabilities, including the streaming of real time data. Talend also expects to expand its inside sales as well as its partner and channel ecosystems.

Related items:

Talend Gets a $40M Shot in the Integration Arm

Jaspersoft, Talend Collaborate on Big Data Tool

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