Open source integrator Talend to invest ‘big’ in APAC, says its CEO

• Opened Singapore office this year, expanding into South-East Asia
• Real-time and predictive analytics dominate customer conversations in SEA

 
MANY companies have described Asia Pacific as the growth engine for their business, and Redwood City, California-based Talend Inc is no exception.
 
The open source big data software integrator is planning to invest big into Asia Pacific, says its chief executive officer Mike Tuchen (pic above).
 
“We see this as a major growth initiative for us in the next couple of years,” he says, speaking to Digital News Asia (DNA) in Singapore recently.
 
“We’ve been in Japan for the last couple of years, we opened the Singapore office this year and we are expanding into all of Asean – and later this year, we will expand into India and China,” he adds.
 
The expansion will bring along the need to expand headcount, and he projects Talend’s office strength here doubling in the coming months, in terms of both size and headcount, although he declines to give actual numbers.
 
The company aims to ride the growth of data-driven businesses in Asia Pacific, according to Tuchen.
 
“We’re seeing the trend here [in Asia Pacific] mirroring a worldwide trend of companies being more data-driven, making decisions based on data to drive higher growth, profitability and efficiency,” he says.
 
Examples of this include Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative, and the e-commerce boom.
 
“E-commerce is huge here and by its nature, is far more data-driven than traditional premises-based retail. You can have more targeted offers, the next product to show based on what you’ve bought, and so on.
 
“That’s so much more a data-driven approach you can do in e-commerce, and we see that as a big driver to more and more data [analytics],” he adds.
 
Analytics levels up
 

 
Among the more relevant trends Talend is seeing is the move towards real-time and predictive analytics.
 
When combined with machine-learning, the technology “really helps companies solve scenarios they could never do before,” says Tuchen – instead of analysing something that has happened, companies can analyse it as it happens, and respond appropriately.
 
This is especially being driven by the instant gratification demands of today’s online business. For example, predictive analytics allows a website to spot when a customer is about to abandon a purchase, and propose more suitable alternatives.
 
“There’s a whole bunch of scenarios that are really opening up that are really important in these online businesses,” says Tuchen.
 
This can also be seen in customer conversations Talend is having in the Asia Pacific region, of which Tuchen says there are two types.
 
“There are the folks who are innovating and creating these new scenarios, and they are aggressively using these new technologies to solve these problems.
 
“Then you have a lot of other customers that want to learn – they are hearing [about what others are doing], and saying, ‘I want to do that too,’ ” he adds.
 
Secret sauce: Open source and integration
 

 
Being an open source company makes Talend a little different from others, declares Tuchen.
 
“Because we are an open source company, we have downloads in over 100 countries around the world, including Asia where a number of people are using the free open source product.
 
“As we start to have more of a presence here, it [the installed base] becomes a natural base to start working with – that is in fact one of the ways how we prioritise which countries we move into,” he adds.
 
When coupled with the need for businesses to connect new capabilities into existing systems, Talend is in a good position for its Asia Pacific plans, according to Tuchen.
 
“We work with analytics companies, and because we are an integration company, we work with everything – whether it is a proprietary data source, or the new data stack from Hadoop, Spark or so on.
 
“Right now, more and more of our business and our largest and fastest growing product areas are around big data, which is growing at over 100% a year, and we expect that to continue for years to come,” he says, without giving figures.
 
“For us, that new data [analytics] technology is a really important trend, but we work with everybody, and we see many of our customers needing to connect their traditional systems as they start taking advantage of these new systems.
 
“We expect this mixed/ hybrid mode to continue for many years to come,” he adds.
 
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