AWS is a key partner in Talend’s cloud strategy, which this year will see the vendor sell more than half its new bookings on cloud products for the first time.
Mike Pickett, SVP of business development and corporate partnerships at Talend
LAS VEGAS – Data integration provider Talend made a trio of announcements at the AWS Re:Invent show here which relate to their partnership with Amazon. Talend announced that they are one of the vendors to achieve the new AWS Retail Competency status out of the gate. They also announced reception of another new credential, the Amazon Redshift Ready designation, as well as the availability of Talend Cloud in the AWS Marketplace.
Talend is a legacy player from the on-prem days in the data integration space, which has made a strong pivot towards the cloud in recent years. They have over 900 connectors to other vendors’ products, including over 70 AWS services. AWS and Azure are their major cloud partners.
“A year ago, we made a commitment that we would exit 2019 with 50% of our new bookings on cloud products and we are doing that,” said Mike Pickett, SVP of business development and corporate partnerships at Talend. “We had a cloud product when I joined the company in 2015, but we really started it in earnest in 2017. That’s what we emphasize as the direction to our sellers.”
Talend’s business around the Redshift cloud warehouse is not new, but the Amazon Redshift Ready designation is. It is one of the designations in the new AWS Service Ready Program that AWS introduced this year at Re:Invent, with AWS PrivateLink, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and AWS Lambda being the others.
“The designation is a validation that we have passed specific levels for stability and performance,” Pickett said. “We already had hundreds of customers running RedShift, well in advance of what we needed for the new designation. Achieving it wasn’t much effort because we had already been blazing the trail.”
While Talend has a strong business around Redshift, they also work with other cloud data warehouses, including Snowflake, Databricks and Cloudera.
At Re:Invent, AWS also announced a new certification within the Competency Program they established in 2016. That program is notable in awarding status on the basis of Customer references and technical validation, rather than meeting requirements to have specific numbers of people trained on a service. Talend was one of the initial vendors to be awarded the new Retail competency out of the gate.
“Retail is our number one vertical, although we sell into many of them,” Pickett said. “We have over 50 joint customers with AWS. This competency is based upon our success with those joint customers – not getting trained up. They include different use cases within retail as well.” These use cases include Data Lakes, AI/ML, Voice, Recognition, IoT, Microservices, and Retail Transformation.
Finally, Talend also announced immediate availability of the Talend Cloud in the AWS Marketplace.
“We had been talking for years about going in the marketplace,” Pickett said. “Being on the marketplace requires technical integration around billing, and the new program they launched is a true formal program with very clear definitions that make it much more straightforward for a company of our size around what pricing terms are and how to leverage them. We had a soft launch this week for Re:Invent, and I expect it will be more broadly promoted in January.”
