The IT industry is witnessing one of the largest disruptions because of digitization and automation. Globally and in India, organizations are driving their businesses through data backed decisions powered by real time predictive analytics and insights. In an increasingly data driven market, Talend’s open source data integration platform gives companies the agility needed to rapidly adopt the latest technology innovations and scale to meet the constantly evolving demands of modern business.
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“Last year, we had revenues of USD 106 million which was up by 40 per cent compared to previous year. In Q1 this year, we grew by 44 per cent.”
Mike Tuchen
CEO
Talend
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- What are your plans for India market?
India for us is 4 different things, first a commercial opportunity to sell software in the local market. India is second in number of download requests (10,000 per month) of our software, even before we began our office here. The second thing that we are planning to do and are already incurring is starting to engage with a lot of our worldwide customers that have development teams here. Many of our customers have teams here like General Electric, Siemens, Astra Zeneca, Lenovo, HP, Citi Bank and Visa. Having local presence will allow us to work with them closely. We are also looking at India as a hub that will be used to support other customers in Asia region and worldwide. We will take support cases 24 hours. We will provide support and professional services to local region, customer-success management. We look at India as a strategic centre and it will become one of our largest teams in the world.
- How are you planning to expand your reach considering the market opportunity here? Is India ready for large scale of adoption of technologies like Big Data?
We have seen a lot of companies that are adopting big data here. Most of the findings show that they skip last generation and so they have an opportunity right to go to future solutions, building what the rest of the world built in the last 10 years. Saying let’s go ahead to big data, let’s go to cloud because that’s where the world’s gone as they are built from scratch. That’s perfect for us as what we have is next generation solution (Big data, cloud machine learning, self-service). So, for companies here using this technology, we are their software partners.
- What are the challenges that you foresee to the growth of Big Data in India?
Availability of skills is always the biggest challenges to adoption of new technologies like machine learning, Hadoop, and Spark everywhere including India. These specialized skills are still a new market. There is a lot of training needed for customers to be successful in the adoption. It’s true for any new technology. It is evolving rapidly as well, new changes, new capabilities, new scales, new players and new spaces make it difficult overtime. Understanding the entire ecosystem is a skill very few can have.
- Are you planning for channel expansion?
We are looking at resellers, local and regional boutique SIs that have strong technology teams as channel partners in India besides global SIs like Wipro, Accenture, Capgemini and Cognizant
- Are you planning presence in Tier II cities as well?
Right now, we are starting with major cities, Bangalore and Mumbai. We would like to expand.
- Any channel related activities like training you are rolling out with your partners?
We are plugging into an initiative driven by Cloudera, Red Hat, Microsoft titled BASE (Big Analytics Skills Enablement) is all about training partners and customers. These training programs are happening in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. Cloudera initiative called Pace pools relevant technologies together with one training program with recommended curriculum. We also embed our core training into the core curriculum of our large SI partners as part of their on-boarding of new consultants
- Who is your major customer in India and how are you making yourself innovative?
Our major customer worldwide is people who are hand coding. There are number of reasons why we are better. When you hand code, you are less productive than using a software solution. You end up getting locked into a specific version of technology. The hand coding approach is very difficult in a fast-changing world. We can work with them for not only solving today’s problems but also future problems.
- What are your targets for India for next one year?
We are hiring aggressively across all the functions; we intend to double the team in India by end of the year and again double that in the coming year.
- Who are your major customers in India?
We have multi-nationals that have significant presence in India like. GE, HP, Citi bank, Lenovo, Visa, Astra Zeneca. We haven’t gotten permissions yet from our brand new Indian customers to use their names.
- What are the technology trends you foresee over the next one year?
We feel there are big technology trends including Big Data, Cloud (We are 10 years into 20-30-year shift), real time machine learning and self-service (in data integration)
- What are your plans for enterprise market in India?
The primary plan is that enterprise should be able to take advantage of data. World is increasingly data driven. But the problem that customers have that it’s all over the place. It’s in different applications, it’s on the cloud, it’s in different file formats, it’s in premise, it’s in different databases and it is inconsistent. It has errors in it. So, they must solve all those problems before they can make use of it. So, that’s what we do, blend it together and bring it together. Clean it up, making consistent that they can use that to drive their business. That solution consists of 6 different modules. Either you can buy it as an entire package called the Data Fabric. Data integration, big data integration, cloud integration, master data management, application integration and data quality and self-service data preparation. Those are the modules that we provide but it is all about helping companies to make use of the data that they have.
- Are these available to enterprises in India?
Yes
- Are you targeting any e-governance projects in the Government sphere?
We would be working very closely with the government. There has been a big shift in India, the landscape in which customers used to work to what is coming in today. That’s where we will fit into. The leap frog that organizations are going to take, we would be part of that journey.
