Talend upgrades its unified integration platform

Talend adds business process management to its flagship enterprise offering

Open source vendor Talend today launched version 5 of its unified platform for integration, offering technology that brings together disparate enterprise data, and an application to meet an organisation's business process integration needs.

The major new feature in Talend's integration platform is an Enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) module, based on Talend's OEM partnership with open source BPM provider BonitaSoft.

The new suite, called Talend Enterprise BPM, will allow firms to model and integrate existing, legacy and new business processes between their enterprise applications and data.

Enterprise integration software such as Talend's is normally used to let siloed applications such as BI, CRM, and ERP communicate with each other and use each other's data.

A key problem for such applications might be that they use different databases and are run under different operating systems, in some cases legacy operating systems. Talend's new platform is able to accommodate this.

Talend has two offerings, a downloadable open source option called Talend Open Studio, and an enterprise version that is an extension of the first, providing firms with professional-grade tech support and extra enterprise-class features.

Trader Media Group development manager Philip Naughton said, "We've been using Talend for years for a broad range of mission-critical data integration needs."

Trader Media Group currently uses the Talend Integration Suite for data integration; the group is behind the AutoTrader.co.uk web site, which has up to 10 million unique users per month.

"With a number of applications now deployed in the cloud, and an ever-increasing need to expose integration as a service, we see Talend as a significant enabling technology for the business," added Naughton.

A recent report on data integration tools by analyst firm Gartner found that demand is growing "to support the acquisition, alignment and sharing of data, which is now extreme in its volume, variety and velocity. The market still favours products that offer fast time-to-value, enable enterprise scalability and support multiple data delivery styles".

The new version of Talend's Open Studio is available now, but the enterprise editions of the software will not be available until 30 days from today through Talend's usual channels.