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You have just received your Talend renewal bill, and I believe the technical term for it is frightful. It is the kind of number that has you sweating at the thought of the conversation you are going to have with stakeholders.
You are no stranger to Talend’s costs — licensing fees, infrastructure maintenance, the ever-growing complexity of managing your data pipelines. And now this.
But your team relies on Talend. It is woven into the fabric of your business, powering data flows you cannot afford to disrupt. And it has not been an easy journey, either. The workflows are a tangled mess — thousands of pipelines with little documentation, and let’s not even get into the wild ride of tracking data lineage.
Every minor Talend tweak feels like playing Jenga with your infrastructure.
You have been considering a migration for some time, but you have not mustered the confidence or secured the executive buy-in. But now, after Qlik’s acquisition and the soaring costs, you feel forced to put a migration on the roadmap.
The rollercoaster of being on Talend
Talend’s integration into Qlik Cloud was supposed to add value, but all you see is a risky migration to a new product with some familiar features. The new pricing structure feels opaque, leaving you with a sickening sense of uncertainty about what next year’s bill might look like.
Meanwhile, the demands on your team keep growing. Your business needs agility, speed, and innovation, and Talend keeps you tied you to outdated processes and specialised skills that are expensive and increasingly rare.
You are pouring resources into a system that is past its prime but somehow keeps getting more expensive.
Opting for an alternative feels too risky, as you would need to really untangle yourself from something so deeply embedded in the business.
This article aims to reassure you that there is a way to take control of your data estate, to cut costs, and move forwards to the modern, cloud-native future.
Talend has long been a trusted tool for data integration, providing Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) capabilities that allowed businesses to process and transform data at scale. Its acquisition by Qlik in 2023 was positioned as a leap forward, integrating Talend into Qlik Cloud to offer a seamless data ecosystem. However, Qlik’s changes to Talend’s pricing leave organisations like yours grappling with budget overruns, while the platform’s proprietary systems and steep learning curve make it increasingly difficult to find and retain skilled talent. At the same time, issues like scalability costs, complex workflows, and lack of transparency persist.
Hence, for many, the acquisition and the changes that come with it rather bring uncertainty and puts a migration on the roadmap.
If you are on Talend, you are now dealing with:
Skyrocketing costs
One of the biggest challenges for Talend users is the growing expense. Licensing fees have always been significant, but hardware maintenance costs for on-premises deployments add up quickly.
Now, pricing structures have changed again, leaving many organisations staggered at their renewal bills. Reports show that organisations using legacy systems spend up to 70% of their IT budgets on maintenance, leaving little room for innovation. Talend fits this pattern perfectly, becoming another financial drain instead of driving value.
High complexity, low visibility
If you are running Talend, your workflows have likely multiplied over the years. Thousands of pipelines power critical processes, with many not-so-well-documented.
Talend estates grow into a spaghetti bowl, with tacking dependencies or understanding data lineage being no walk in the park. Such lack of visibility slows down debugging, compliance audits, and system optimisation, creating bottlenecks that hurt your organisation’s ability to move fast.
Siloed and fragmented data
Talend’s architecture makes it hard to share and reuse models, leading to data silos. Teams working on similar problems often duplicate efforts because there’s no easy way to collaborate across workflows. This fragmentation wastes time and resources, while also increasing the risk of inconsistent outputs.
Steep learning curves and talent gaps
Talend’s proprietary tools require specialised skills that are increasingly rare. Meanwhile, modern cloud-native tools like dbt and Fivetran leverage SQL, making them more accessible and easier to learn.
What is the Talend alternative?
The thought of leaving Talend feels overwhelming. The tool is deeply embedded in your operations, with workflows tied to mission-critical processes, that it feels sticky. A migration looks like an overwhelming task that comes with perfectly valid fears, including:
- It is too risky, what if something breaks?
- We have too much custom code. How could we ever replicate that elsewhere?
- I don’t even know where to start.
These are valid concerns. After all, only a fraction of transformation projects deliver. Most data leaders cite budget and delays as the main issues.
As Talend becomes further integrated into Qlik, with its offerings increasingly centred around Qlik Cloud, modernisation is inevitable. You can passively accept Qlik’s strategy, marked by rising prices for Talend that push you toward their cloud ecosystem, or take this opportunity to explore broader, more competitive options that better align with your evolving needs.
Migrations come with their challenges, but sticking with Talend comes with risks, too. Costs keep climbing. Talent gaps keep widening. And your team spends more time wrestling with the system than driving innovation.
In this context, a migration is not just a choice but a necessity for organisations that want to stay competitive. The good news is that there are modern tools like dbt Cloud, Fivetran, and Infinite Lambda’s Flowline that drastically reduce the risks and complexity of a migration while driving value, which the business could not previously unlock.
dbt Cloud and Fivetran
Here is a tried-and-tested stack that Infinite Lambda has delivered to over 100 customers across the globe to help them reduce Total Cost of Ownerhip (TCO) and increase in data productivity meaningfully.
Modernising your data estate does not mean starting from scratch. Tools like dbt Cloud and Fivetran provide a clear path forward, offering lower costs, easier collaboration, and the real scalability you need.
When is this the right choice?
If you are spending more on Talend than you are getting back, or if your team is bogged down by complexity and outdated workflows, it is time to consider the change. Organisations across industries — retail, finance, healthcare — are finding value in moving to modern, cloud-native platforms.
Key benefits of dbt Cloud and Fivetran
- Lower TCO: Cloud-native platforms eliminate expensive hardware and reduce licensing fees, freeing up budget for innovation;
- Simplified workflows: dbt Cloud lets you model and transform data using SQL, a language your team already knows;
- Version control and collaboration: With Git-based workflows, teams can work together seamlessly and track changes with ease;
- Scalability and adaptability: Fivetran automates data ingestion and adapts to schema changes, ensuring pipelines do not break as your source systems evolve;
- Data quality: Tools like dbt help enforce best practices, making it easier to build pipelines you can trust.
Migration options
So how do you actually migrate, given that the decision is not fully yours? You have three main paths to choose from: manual, fully automated, or an automation-powered migration with expert optimisations.
Manual migration
Some organisations attempt to migrate manually. This can work for smaller estates, but for larger ones, it is risky since manual processes are prone to human error. It is also extremely time-consuming, as the effort required to rewrite workflows often outweighs the benefits.
Automation only
Fully automated migrations look like a great way to save time and eliminate errors. However, to make sure your new data estate reflects your business, you need to tailor it to the business logic. This takes an individual approach on top of the automation that is well-rooted in migration experience to ensure you bake-in best practices and avoid the mistakes others have already made.
Automated migration with Infinite Lambda’s Flowline
Infinite Lambda’s Flowline is a product specifically designed to help organisations move from legacy systems like Talend to modern platforms powered by dbt Cloud and Fivetran.
For instance, using Flowline, Infinite Lambda delivered over 45 workspaces in 90 days to production. The optimised code resulted in 1600 dbt models, which could not have been handcrafted by hand.
It combines the streamlining and accuracy of automation with the expertise of highly-experienced consultants to offer the optimisations that turn a legacy system into an AI-enabled data platform that delivers business value at scale.
Key benefits of Infinite Lambda’s Flowline
- Automated code translation: Flowline converts Talend workflows into SQL-based transformations, automating up to 90% of the process;
- Comprehensive change management: Bespoke training and adoption frameworks ensure your team is ready to hit the ground running;
- Risk-free delivery: Fixed-cost, predictable-timeline projects eliminate surprises and provide predictable results;
- Optimised architecture and workloads: Flowline will not just copy your existing setup but improve it, creating a platform that is faster, more scalable, and easier to manage.
The challenges of migrating from Talend
You clearly see the need to migrate from Talend to a cloud-native platform, but there are a number of risks you are considering, and the final decision is not entirely yours to make, either.
Let’s talk about what you are facing:
Main business challenges
- Stakeholder buy-in: You will likely be tackling worries around the costs and the risks of a cloud migration often block the decision.
Communicate the long-term savings and improved agility that the modernisation will trigger. Having a delivery excellence team will help you ensure you get exactly where you need with the migration. - Fear of disruption: Many teams worry about pipeline failures or downtime during the transition.
Proper planning eliminates these risks, but again takes an experienced team and a comprehensive communication strategy.
Technological challenges
- Mapping workflows: Talend workflows are often complex, with nested transformations that need to be carefully mapped to SQL-based systems;
- Data ingestion: Migrating data from Talend’s proprietary setup to Fivetran requires careful configuration to ensure nothing is lost or corrupted;
- Validation: Ensuring the results that the new system produces are accurate and consistent is critical to a successful migration.
What now?
Regardless of what your final decision about Talend is, you need somewhere to begin, and you need to know your options before you commit.
At Infinite Lambda, we help companies get started by offering a free project assessment to determine the migration feasibility and provide clarity around costs and effort.
Reach out to book a no-obligation meeting to discuss your challenges and goals, and learn more about the assessment process.
Visit the Infinite Lambda Blog for more insights into the hottest topics in data, analytics, and AI for business.
