-Advisors to Finnish Ministry of Agriculture select open source data integration tool to meet data demands-

Tike, the Information Centre of the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, has turned to Talend to meet the demand of its continually growing data warehouse by implementing its open source data integration tool.

Tike works with a number of interrelated agencies working under the Ministry umbrella to maintain ICT environments and applications, including reporting and business intelligence tools. It also produces statistics on the Finnish agriculture sector and national food chain as well as collating and sharing information on natural resources.

Faced with rapidly increasing demands on its existing data warehouse, it needed to upgrade its existing ETL tool. Performance was becoming a critical business issue as the organisation was increasingly faced with slower development cycles, which meant that reports were not always available the following day when needed.

Tommi Korpi, DW architect at Tike comments: “Over the past few years our data warehousing environment has grown dramatically and as that process has taken place, it had become increasingly apparent that our incumbent tool was out-dated, certainly not powerful or efficient enough to cope with our increased reporting demands. So we began to look for an alternative. Being the first open source vendor to enter Gartner’s Data Integration Magic Quadrant we were immediately drawn towards Talend.”

“It was essential that the new tool was simple to use, fully equipped with modern debugging features and one that provided us with advanced version control management, so that we have absolute control over our data and integration processes, whilst also increasing performance levels. Talend Enterprise Data Integration not only met these demands but also being Java-based meant that it was compatible with a majority of our existing operational applications,” added Tommi Korpi.

Tike selected Rongo, a Finnish-based Talend consulting partner, to provide a comprehensive Talend ETL-solution including both Talend software and consulting services. Working with Tike, Rongo was able to help in the design, mapping and definition the organisation’s complex data transformation and integration processes.

François Méro, vice president of global sales, Talend says: “Tike had identified a number of technical and business goals that it aimed to achieve with a new ETL tool, and Talend met these requirements and more. Talend Enterprise Data Integration not only improved on the technical performance of the previous tool but it also delivers more cost-efficient ETL development and will reduce development cycles in the future. We have also been able to provide Tike with an improved search capability enabling comprehensive control of its data, which in turn helps it to improve productivity throughout the organisation.”

Tommi Korpi concluded: “Our key objectives for this project were to lower our TCO by making our ETL development more cost efficient by increasing technical performance and usability which would dramatically improve the speed of development as Talend products are both feature and function rich. The added benefit is that Talend is significantly more cost effective due to the different approach it takes to its licensing model.”