In the Digital Era, growing companies increasingly find themselves amassing great data stores. The size and diversity of these data sets can result in sprawl and confusion for IT teams. Bringing in a vendor to integrate and organize them can be costly; we spoke with one technologist about the pros and cons of available options.

Dan Allen is a senior ETL developer at CashStar Inc., an electronic gifting company. Allen told Sam Kahane (@Sam_Kahane) of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, how the company tackled the downside of Big Data.

“As our systems expanded, it became apparent we needed data integration software, because we weren’t just reading everything out of one database or one system,” he explained.

Upgrading for less

With simple Java doing all of its data integration work, the company began searching for a more sophisticated tool. It looked at Informatica, which Allen said was simply not in their budget.

Then it chose Talend Inc., because, as Allen stated, it provides the best data integration software for the price. “And that’s coming from somebody who previously worked at an Informatica shop,” he added.

Consolidating data

Allen said CashStar started small and moved up to Talend’s enterprise platform.

“By using some of the dynamic schema components, we’ve been able to streamline a ton of the data integration that we do,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Talend Beer and Big Data 2016. (*Disclosure: Some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. However, no sponsorships have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE