by Charles Roe
In an effort to leverage the knowledge of several of the top minds in the Data Management industry, DATAVERSITY™ has been conducting a series of interviews on some of the most relevant topics in the field today. Recently, we interviewed Cédric Carbone, the Chief Technical Officer at Talend.
Cédric will be giving a workshop at the Enterprise Data World 2013 Conference in San Diego, CA from April 28-May 2, 2013. The session is titled “The Big Challenge of Big Data and Hadoop Integration.”
The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.
The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Cédric Carbone on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his session at the upcoming conference:
DATAVERSITY (DV): Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry e.g role at company (as opposed to job title), past experience and how you got started in the data profession?
Cédric Carbone (CC): My name is Cédric Carbone and I’m Talend’s Chief Technical Officer since its inception in 2006, where I manage the Big Data, Data Integration, Data Quality, MDM and ESB product lines with an international team of more than 140 R&D engineers. I’m also a Board Member at the Eclipse Foundation and OW2 consortium.
DV: What’s the focus of the work do you currently do within your organization?
CC: The market wants a 360-degree integration that covers data, process and application integration without forgetting Data Quality which is increasingly becoming an integral part of the solution. Every customer needs a single tool to be able to cover all these needs. One of my main objectives at Talend is to secure the strong integration between our products through an efficient Unify Platform.
Another work focus is Big Data: it is significantly disrupting status quo in the data management market – incumbents are unsuccessfully trying to adapt legacy solutions to deal with this. I spend a lot of time to exchange with our prospects and customers to be sure we develop at Talend the solution that will fill all their Big Data use cases, focusing on profiling, data integration, parsing, data manipulation and data quality. I also have an interest in the merge of ESB and Big Data, to be able to have an easy access to all information stored in a customer’s Big Data cluster.
DV: What is the biggest change going on in your particular area of the industry at this time?
CC: Big Data forces a change in your way of thinking! Before the availability of Big Data technology, Business Intelligence teams put their minds together and asked data integration teams for a static DataMart: they knew exactly what they wanted to monitor and knew in advance which were the KPIs as well as the metrics to compute in the BI dashboards.
With Big Data, you collect huge amounts of data to find useful information and interesting connections between data, you didn’t have in mind before. You can then define more efficient KPIs and metrics that come from this new information. By collecting and analyzing all this material, companies gain insight into new business opportunities and threats.
DV: How does such a change affect your job?
CC: At Talend, we have decided to go with the market and democratize Big Data by producing our own solution: Talend Open Studio for Big Data. We are providing a powerful and versatile open source Big Data product that makes the job of working with Big Data technologies easy and helps drive and improve business performance.
DV: What are you going to discuss during your session at Enterprise Data World and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing, and the benefits the audience will obtain).
CC: In the session at Enterprise Data World, I will be discussing how data integration and data quality tooling can help you in your Big Data project put data inside your Hadoop cluster, parse your unstructured data, do complex data transformation easily, profile your data, cleanse your data and easily access your data stored in a Hadoop cluster thanks to REST or Web Services. All these steps can be done thanks to a graphical tool without writing a line of code and with no knowledge of Map/Reduce.
DV: How has your job, and/or the work you’re doing at your organization, changed in the past 12 months? How do you expect it to change in the next 1-2 years?
CC: Twelve months ago, Big Data projects were only Proof Of Concepts. Now, we have real, live Big Data projects that are going into production with hundreds and even thousands of data nodes.
DV: More broadly speaking, what do you believe is the most significant change happening in Enterprise Data at this time?
CC: As we have previously talked about in this interview, I believe Big Data is the most significant change in Enterprise Data. To go further, it could also be a revolution that can convince companies to remodel their information system.
DV: How is Big Data going to affect your job (in your organization) in future?
CC: More than likely in my job, I should be seeing a growing interest in Big Data solutions and therefore developing products that will be going with the market’s demand. The area has also seen an increase in partnerships and specialized companies: this should be a growing trend in the future. We are also thinking that previous work areas will have less importance, so as a CTO, I will be working on that shift as it happens.
DV: What is something noteworthy about yourself that you would like to tell the conference attendees and our readers that they may not know?
CC: Data is not only my job, it has been a passion for many years: this is one of the reasons I joined Talend in 2006. Other noteworthy items readers might not know include that I’m an avid traveler: you might see me in an airplane going to Europe (France, Germany, UK…), the United States (mainly California, where we have two offices) and Asia (Beijing). As I’m also a college teacher, I lectured at several universities in the past on technical topics such as XML or Web Services. I have always loved teaching students my work passion!
If you are interested in attending Cédric’s workshops at EDW2013, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2013.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=72&scheduleDay=PRINT
The workshop is on Tuesday, April 30, at 10.20am.
About Enterprise Data World:
Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.
