Talend has acquired Gamma Soft for an undisclosed sum. Gamma Soft is an innovative change data capture (CDC) vendor that enables organisations to ingest data from various data sources in real-time. Gamma Soft will add its enterprise-class CDC technology to the Talend Data Fabric. While Talend already had real-time data capture capabilities, the Gamma Soft product takes its capabilities to a new level.
Gamma Soft is already used by over 150 customers, including firms such as Alstom, Louis Latour and Brinks. The new real-time capability should enable Talend to penetrate the manufacturing and financial services markets and become the sole vendor of choice for its data management solutions.
Gamma Soft strengthens Talend in three ways:
- It adds new integration options for real-time data replications
- Offers new enterprise replication technologies, including bi-directional and broadcast
- Enables organisations to upgrade legacy systems to a modern cloud architecture, especially IBM i Series
Christal Bemont, CEO of Talend, commented: “We are thrilled to welcome the talented Gamma Soft team to Talend. Complementary to our product portfolio, Gamma Soft deepens our already comprehensive integration capabilities and gives us new functionality for enabling advanced, real-time business insight. More broadly, Gamma Soft extends the value we provide customers in helping them quickly build, continually monitor, and easily optimize enterprise-wide data health.”
Enterprise Times spoke to Jamie Fiorda, Vice President, Product Marketing at Talend and Philippe Billard, Director of Product Management, about the acquisition.
How does Gamma Soft fit into the Talend Data Fabric?
The answer to this question is not simple. Gamma Soft has a strong portfolio of customers that are not using Talend. ET asked Billard where Gamma Soft would fit into the Talend Data Fabric. He replied: “We will offer the Gamma Soft capabilities as standalone, as well as part of the end to end solution. Within the data fabric, it will enable enterprise-grade use cases within real-time integration and become an extension of our connector family.”
Fiorda added: “We’re going to sell it as an independent, standalone solution. We’re investigating how to incorporate it within other Talend packages and products.”
This is good news for existing customers of Gamma Soft. However, Fiorda would not be drawn on what the roadmap looks like for the CDC tool saying that they are working on that currently. Talend has also not yet decided what it will name the new component.
Gamma Soft strengthens what was once a weaker point in the weave of features that makes up the Talend Data Fabric. With Gamma Soft, Talend will be able to solve more uses cases for its customers. It will remove their reliance on other solutions and enable them to leverage a single platform, Talend, for data management.
In a wider context of fitting in, Fiorda noted: “This is a key part of our data health vision. It extends the use cases that our customers can solve today. When we think about data health, we think about how businesses need to evolve into treating data as an asset for their business.
“It will be an important capability that allows us to increase our focus around key data observability use cases so that data professionals can manage and understand their data faster and in ways that are more up to speed with the changes taking place in the data.”
On Gamma Soft
The dust is settling on this deal. While Fiorda revealed that the Gamma Soft team would be joining Talend, he did not disclose what roles the senior leadership team will have at Talend. Headquartered in Paris, France, Gamma Soft has only around seven employees (Source LinkedIn).
The deal will open up opportunities for growth that it might have struggled with. It also means that its CDC solution can now become part of a larger solution. They no longer need to worry that companies like Talend and Precisely will steal customers.
That may have been happening already. The press release stated that the company had 150 customers, and the website says it has around 200 sites.
Véronique Goussard, co-founder and general manager of Gamma Soft, said, “Joining Talend is a great fit from a product and cultural perspective for Gamma Soft and for our customers. Talend will help take our CDC capabilities to the next level and provide customers with a single, end-to-end solution to successfully execute on data strategies that rely on quickly capturing changing data for analysis in cloud, hybrid or multi-cloud implementations.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This appears to be a good acquisition by Talend. It is one that, despite its apparent small size, could boost Talend’s revenues significantly. It delivers capabilities that will open up use cases such as supply chain optimisation and fraud detection. Both of these require real-time data. It will potentially give Talend access to some significant organisations in France. It will hope to deliver more solutions and services to those enterprises.
While Talend is now headquartered in the US, it was founded in France. The cultural fit between the two companies is likely to be strong, as Goussard notes. Talend still has much to reveal about his latest acquisition. But, once the dust has settled, it could be one of the company’s most impactful purchases.
