The Talend Data Trust Score provides built-in trust scores for specific data, which comes from a new Data Inventory application, and allows the user to press a button to fix many data issues.

On Wednesday, data integration and data integrity vendor Talend became the latest to take its major customer event virtual. Talend Connect ran for the North American audience, and will run again on Thursday for EMEA customers, with appropriate local language support.

The theme of the virtual conference this year was very much on the second of Talend’s two core areas, data integrity.

“You think of us as a data integration company, but we make sure that you have trust behind that data,” Christal Bemont, Talend’s CEO, told the audience.  Bemont stated that bad data costs organizations $3 trillion a year, and that half of enterprise data has integrity issues.

“There is virtually no communication between the analytics that run the business and all the checks and balances that ensure quality of data,” she warned. “The questions to ask yourselves – can we measure the health of our data? Across the whole organization? Across the Lines of Business? Is it important to measure that? Can you trust the data you make critical decisions around? We believe these are unanswered questions that exist in the market today.

“We have taken a number of steps to bridge the divide,” Bemont stressed.

Customer stories then made their appearance although only one ‘spoke’ from his quarantined location, Charles Link, Director of Data and Analytics, at Covanta, which generates energy by clean burning of waste. He discussed how they use Talend specifically to address this quality of data issue.

Link was followed by Julien Sauvage, Vice President, Product Marketing at Talend, who got to make the new offering announcement from the event.

“Where’s the data coming from,” Sauvage asked the virtual audience. “Is it good? Can I trust it? As a result, people end up making big and small decisions every day almost blind. They do so without certainty and without confidence. This is what Talend is solely for. We are creating a connection between the analytics running the business and the systems, checks and balances ensuring the quality and compliance of the data, so the data they are betting their businesses on is data they can trust.”

Sauvage then formally announced the Talend Data Trust Score – to provide the dashboard and reports with a built-in trust score, which comes from a new Data Inventory application.

“The Talend Data Trust Score delivers an instant assessment of your data’s health and accuracy based on data quality, data popularity and client and user defined ratings,” he said. “It allows you to assess the relevance and trustworthiness of your data at first sight.”

What Sauvage called simple tools also allow the relevant issues to be addressed if the score is low. He did a demo showing a very low data trust score, which directly corelates with an electronic marketing campaign’s low open rates. He clicked on a ‘Fix My Data’ button which took him to a dashboard in Talend Data Fabric where he could see all the marketing data in the company and the data trust for each app. The dashboard showed a trend of issues with their Marketo data, and directly suggested actions he should take to make the data better and improve the Trust Score, without having to put in a ticket. It gave him three options, and he went for the simplest, cleaning his email addresses. That raised the Trust Score from 44 to 89.

“This is the power of a Data Trust Score,” Sauvage said. “At a glance I know I can have confidence in my data. The Talend Data Trust Score warranties that all reports are backed by quality data. For the first time ever, we can measure the health of data across the entire organization.”

The event then broke into a series of concurrent sessions, all quickly available afterward for attendees who wanted to see more than one at the same time, which is one of the virtual format’s advantages over a traditional event.

Ciaran Dynes, Talend’s SVP Products, headlined the closing keynote focusing on the theme of how data intelligence evolves towards digital intelligence, which is fundamentally related to data trust.

Dynes said that companies typically have two strategies around analytics – divining insights, and monetization to exploit the insights, with metadata being the secret sauce between them. He discussed the strategies of Talend customer Dominos, which was an early investor in digital, over 10 years ago, and used that to transform itself from a struggling pizza chain to a strong digital company that delivers pizza, and which has increased share price faster than big tech companies.

“They learned its 4x cheaper to take an order digitally than over the telephone,” Dynes noted.

The problem is that most organizations today find it difficult to get control of their data chaos. A Bain survey indicated that 20% of an average company’s productivity is lost to organizational drag, which make it hard to be a digital organization.

“The problem so much of the data toolset there are using today are siloed, manual, error-prone, or simply disjointed,” Dynes said. “Customers turn to the Talend Data Fabric to help them address those monetization strategies.”

Dynes then spoke at some length about the Talend Data Fabric and its underlying philosophies, as well as the Talend Winter release that was launched several weeks ago.

“Talend Winter has new capabilities around data inventory, a massively enhanced Pipeline Designer with new tools around data quality and new capabilities around AI, especially combining governance with AI into what we call Explainable AI,” he said.

For the future, Dynes stated that Talend is building a new type of integration platform, self aware, self healing, self optimizing with minimal human intervention, that can drive data throughout the whole business and bring together that digital intelligence concept into a collective knowledge, and embedding them into business applications.  He also announced Talend Data Catalog in the Cloud, an as-a-Service offering that will be coming at the end of the quarter.