Our reflections on the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Quality Solutions

Success for any business starts with data that is easily discoverable, understandable, and of value to the people who need it. We call this type of data “healthy data.” You should look at a wide set of measures and metrics to determine whether data is healthy or not, but at the core of all healthy data is a high level of quality.

With the tsunami of data coming from an ever-expanding number of sources, delivering high-quality data is bound to remain a massive challenge for any organization.

And they’re not ready for it. Traditionally, quality processes are treated as a separate component of the data lifecycle. This is the wrong approach. For data to be truly healthy, its quality must be continuously assessed, improved, and tracked. This modern, pervasive approach can eliminate many data quality pitfalls by ensuring that data is ready for use anytime, anywhere.

Data quality cannot be an afterthought

The value of having accessible, high-quality data is not lost on most companies. In fact, more organizations than ever before are recognizing the necessity of improving their data. According to Gartner®, “through 2024, 50% of organizations will adopt modern data quality solutions to better support their digital business initiatives.”

Given the importance of data quality, choosing the right data quality solution is a critical step every business will eventually have to face. Gartner evaluated 15 vendors that provide data quality solutions, and we couldn’t be prouder that they named Talend a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Data Quality Solutions. This is the fourth time in a row we’ve been placed in the Leaders quadrant, based on our ability to execute and completeness of vision.
Read your complimentary copy of the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions

Talend Data Fabric provides a pervasive, end-to-end approach to data quality, delivering capabilities including data integration, self-service data preparation, application and API integration, data integrity, and governance in a single, unified platform – with automated data quality built in every step of the way.

This is the only approach that can ensure you run your business on healthy data, and we believe our recognition as a Leader validates both our approach to data quality as a pervasive capability and our ability to help our customers win the war against bad data.

4 major business challenges – and how to solve them

In its report, Gartner identified four of the major business challenges that organizations face, noting that “all these challenges drive the adoption of data quality solutions.” We agree, and we have some tips on how to solve those challenges:

1. Minimize and mitigate risks with compliance and privacyUngoverned, unprotected data puts everything at risk, and one misstep could cost you millions in fines…and your customers’ trust. Not to mention the cost of relying on bad data to make critical decisions that can change the trajectory of your entire business. By assessing and tracking the quality of your data with advanced technologies like the Talend Trust Score™, you can easily find and fix problem areas to reduce operational risks and costs.
2. Shorten the data preparation process in data pipelinesA unified platform like Talend Data Fabric offers self-service data preparation capabilities with data quality built in. Plus, its point-and-click interface means that business users can participate in profiling, cleansing, and enriching activities, instead of having to wait for a specialist to help.
3. Increase business efficiency with process automation and data sharingChoosing a solution that can automate processes like data cleansing and enrichment can free up resources to focus on more meaningful tasks. And harnessing the power of metadata and APIs makes it easier to discover and share trusted data with everyone who needs it.
4. Turn data into revenue with analytics and AIThere are a couple different ways to think about this. The first deals with the data quality processes themselves, where machine learning and AI can augment tasks like deduplication, validation, and standardization, or provide recommendations for addressing data quality issues. The second consideration is how your data impacts other applications that rely on analytics and AI. For the best, most accurate outcomes, high-quality data is vital.

Even though these challenges may seem impossible to tackle, our customers have solved them with high quality data. Today they get accurate analytics faster, a better understanding of their customers, and tangible business results.

Improving analytics with high-quality data

SSQ Insurance is one of Canada’s largest financial institutions, offering auto, home, life, travel, group, health, and credit insurance, along with investment products. After 75 years of operation, its data systems had become complex, siloed, and unable to be used effectively.

The company knew that to truly understand its customers, it would need to put healthy, high-quality data at the center of its business. “We weren’t prepared to make any compromises as far as data quality is concerned,” says Simon Latouche, Director of Data Engineering. “By using Talend Data Quality, we were able to standardize and clean our data.”

“Talend offers a complete solution, from data integration to data enhancement, to API-based applications,” adds Robert Beauregard, BI Architect. After partnering with Talend, SSQ Insurance built out a unified Customer Center portal, where its contracts display is consolidated in a single location. Customers’ operations are automatically registered on the portal, and call centers have access to more comprehensive data. Marketing can now customize its campaigns by using consolidated, high-quality data to run predictive models and analytics. SSQ Insurance has tripled its conversion rates in terms of customer win-back actions and realized a 30% improvement in efficiency of development teams.

“We now have the necessary foundations to achieve our marketing strategy based on the next best action,” says Annie Pelletier, Marketing and E-Business Director. “We can use Talend to build up a 360-degree view of the customer so that we are able to send the right offer to the right customer, via the right channel and with the right message.”

Developing a trusted view of customers on a global scale

A global leader in low-carbon energy and services has made its mission to accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral world through more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly solutions, including advanced technologies like offshore wind, green gas, and geothermal energy.

But with 24 geographical divisions and 70 country entities, the company faced challenges when it came to using data to understand the consumption habits of its customers. So, the organization turned to Talend.

“Talend is second to none for trusted data. Prior to its implementation, more than 7% of our data was being rejected due to quality issues,” says the company’s director of business acceleration. “With Talend, this percentage has fallen considerably, which is significant given that more than 90,000 opportunities are added to the system each week.”

Now, the company trusts the quality and accuracy of the data on its 300,000 key accounts, which represents €28.5 billion in annual sales. “We have a clear view of business activity over the next 12 months. We know the status of each opportunity and which products or services are involved. At the same time, we know more about each account, which makes it easier to cross-sell, make more sales, and manage our pipeline. This shared, comprehensive vision of our customers helps us meet our ambitious goals for a carbon-neutral world.”

Build your business on a foundation of quality

Data quality doesn’t have to be an elusive ideal that always seems out of reach. With the right approach – and the right partner – anyone can improve the quality of their data and benefit from all the advantages it provides.

At Talend, we’re committed to supporting as many people as we can on their journey to healthy, high-quality data. In 2020, we expanded the resources available to our customers by tripling our network of cloud partners, data partners, and systems integrators. And we experienced substantial growth of our user community, where 46,000 users share tips, best practices, and support for data quality initiatives.

We have also expanded the availability of innovative technologies like the Talend Trust Score, which automatically assesses the health of your data and provides advice on how to improve it. In June, we announced Talend Trust Score for Snowflake, which enables Snowflake customers to run quality checks on their datasets without using external applications or moving data out of the Snowflake environment.

We believe that everyone should have access to the best quality data so that they can make the best decisions. We want to thank all our customers who have put their trust in Talend, and we look forward to announcing more innovations that will make data quality more attainable. If you’re ready to start your journey to healthy, high-quality data, we invite you to discover Talend, try our data quality stack, and become part of our growing user community.