Data integration software provider Talend Inc. has updated its Data Fabric platform, introducing broader support for a multitude of public cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Snowflake.

Talend Data Fabric Summer ‘17, as the new release is called, is software that’s designed to help companies integrate data from multiple cloud platforms. Data integration is important for things such as consolidating customer records in a customer relationship management application with those in a marketing application to create targeted messaging. The process involves bringing multiple data sources together and harmonizing them so that there is a single canonical record of the customer.

Talend argues that data integration is becoming increasingly important as the trend accelerates among enterprises to adopt a “hybrid cloud” strategy that involves using multiple cloud providers. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Talend Chief Marketing Officer Ashley Stirrup cited figures from the analyst firm International Data Corp. that show more than half of enterprises already have a multicloud strategy in place, and that another 20 percent plan to implement one.

“They do this to avoid lock-in or because a service is cheaper on one platform than another,” Stirrup said.

The main focus of Talend’s summer update is on boosting support for platforms like Azure, GCP and Snowflake in order to better facilitate enterprises’ adoption of multiple cloud providers. “Summer 17 is about providing the broadest support across different platforms,” he said. “We’re taking Azure, Snowflake, GCP to the same level as we’ve had on AWS and Cloudera.”

Talend’s platform was already highly integrated with AWS and Cloudera, Stirrup noted. He said that the company already possessed the full set of certifications for AWS and had built native connectors, yet for platforms like Azure and GCP it was forced to use standard connectors. With the update, however, Talend now has full certifications for both platforms for native connectors.

More specifically, the company said it now provides extensive support for Azure big data, Microsoft’s native NoSQL and data storage services, which should simplify cloud data pipeline creation for developers on Azure.

“Say you’re creating a data pipeline where you’re pulling together clickstream data with next-best-offer algorithm using machine learning,” Stirrup explained. “You can build that on AWS and transfer that entire job to Azure with a minimum of tweaking. Our entire product is a visual design.”

Stirrup said Talend has also added support for GCP Dataproc (Google’s version of Hadoop), G Storage, G Pub/Sub, G BigQuery. In addition, Talend Data Fabric Summer ‘17 integrates Cloudera Inc.’s big data-as-a-service offering Altus. For Snowflake, which offers a cloud-based data warehouse solution, Talend has introduced a new purpose-built bulk loader that the company claims can load data up to twenty times faster.

“We’re seeing a big uptake of Snowflake,” Stirrup said. “It’s an alternative to RedShift with very strong performance, minimal DevOps complexity and strong JSON support.”

Talend said its Summer ‘17 release will become generally available on June 29, and that existing customers will be upgraded to the latest version on July 18. The solution is licensed on a subscription basis per developer, but the company declined to provide pricing details at this stage.

Image: Talend