Talend, Google Cloud: Big Data Partnership

“Democratization” is the kind of buzzword one expects from politicians, not open source software developers. Yet democratizing Big Data has become the latest focus of Talend, according to the company’s recent announcement of its collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program. Here’s the scoop, and what it could mean for businesses large and small with an interest in managing Big Data.

On Tuesday, Talend, which develops the open source world’s most complete solution for Big Data integration, announced it has joined Google’s Cloud Platform Partner Program as a Technology Partner. The move allows users of Talend’s products to integrate a number of Google resources within their Big Data infrastructures, such as Google Cloud Storage and the BigQuery data-analysis tool.

‘Democratizing’ Data

But the biggest news, at least as Talend is positioning it, isn’t the mere integration of Google services with Talend’s products. Instead, it’s what the collaboration means for extending Talend’s reach as a Big Data solution for organizations for which the company’s products previously didn’t make sense. In the words of Talend co-founder and COO Fabrice Bonan:

And while it might seem unsurprising for Talend to latch onto buzzwords such as “democratize” in the midst of the American presidential campaigning season, the company does indeed seem to be onto something significant. In particular, this move should help increase Talend’s appeal to smaller organizations that might otherwise have deemed their IT infrastructures and needs too small to merit a solution such as Talend’s without the integrated availability of the additional tools offered by Google.

As a result, Talend’s collaboration with Google means that the open source company is helping advance one of the core tenets of the open source movement itself: Software should be freely available to everyone regardless of his or her particular circumstances or resources. Enterprise-class Big Data solutions, Talend appears committed to proving, are not just for big businesses.

Of course, there’s still somewhat of a catch in that taking advantage of Talend’s partnership with Google will mean exposing your data to Google, which not everyone may be comfortable doing. But for the non-habitually paranoid, the collaboration opens important new opportunities by making Talend’s open source Big Data solutions a more feasible choice for smaller organizations both within and without the open source channel.