Available immediately as a free download, the open source desktop application allows users to explore, cleanse, enrich and combine data from different sources in minutes instead of hours using intuitive, drag-and-drop tools, smart guides and automated processing functions. The result is that employees throughout an organisation, from field marketing, to sales, operations to finance, can quickly and easily turn data into informed business actions. “While many companies have made good progress on their path to becoming more data driven, a major stumbling block is often the last mile of the journey as companies work to get accurate and actionable information in the hands of more business users,” said Ciaran Dynes, vice president of products, Talend. “Talend Data Preparation helps bridge this gap by alleviating the common challenges of overburdened IT teams that can’t keep up with the growing data demands of the business, and data analysts who are all too frequently spending more time wrangling data than they are supplying insights.”
Talend Data Preparation streamlines the flow of data throughout the organisation, allowing line of business users to apply their unique domain expertise and work directly with the data that’s relevant to their business objectives. At the same time, by dramatically reducing the cycles required to prepare or fix data, Talend Data Preparation allows business analysts to not only deliver more insight, but also go far deeper into their analysis of key data sets.
Talend Data Preparation’s web-based interface and workflow is intuitive and provides users intelligent assistance as they import, structure and transform data. Even without an IT skillset, users can quickly get data in the form needed, while avoiding having to create complicated formulas, write code, or complete the same tasks over and over again. Key features include auto content discovery or identification, smart suggestions, cleansing and enrichment functions, as well as data visualisations to allow users to identify outliers or other data problems. The product also allows key “recipes” or formulas to be saved and reused, further speeding up future projects.
"Extracting value from data has historically involved a lot of time and effort - especially when it is disparate and from multiple sources. And far too much of that time and effort has been spent just getting the data ready to be analysed rather than in the analysis process itself," said Philip Howard, research director at Bloor Research. "With self-service tools like Talend Data Preparation, organisations can cut the time to actionable insight by a significant margin - some estimates are as much as 60 percent - making the remaining time and effort far more rewarding."
A commercial version of the product is planned for release in Q2 2016. This self-service version will also offer data governance and compliance functionality and controls, the ability for multi-user role-based access, high performance server-based data processing capabilities and support for hundreds of data sources and targets.
