2021 Talend Data Masters Award Winners!
By Laura Ventura
Great ideas and insights from our 10 TDMA winners from around the world
Each year, Talend honors the creativity and achievements of 10 customers who have harnessed our products to turn data into gold. This year, our selection committee had to grapple with trimming the list from more than 100 worthy candidates into just 10 Talend Data Masters Award winners.
While we celebrate the innovations and successes of all TDMA entrants, we have chosen these 10 because they highlight the art of the possible. They show how real people in real companies have come up with practical ways to transform data into better customer service, more efficient processes, lower costs, and new competitive advantages. And they provide fresh insights and lessons all of us can learn from.
So read on. Discover new ways to transform the possibilities of data into real business value.
The Estée Lauder Companies
Category: Data for business growth
Reinventing the retail model with innovative uses of consumer data
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) needed to completely rethink and revitalize the core business model. With thousands of stores closed indefinitely, how could the company continue to employ 60,000 workers, maintain supply chain operations, and keep sales strong?
One of the answers was a more innovative use of data — more specifically, creating a Consumer Data Platform (CDP) driven by Talend. By providing near real-time access to granular, personalized consumer data across all retail channels and brands, the CDP drove higher sales through better campaign management, marketing, CRM, and analytics.
Prior to the pandemic, 80% of customer interactions began online, but 85% of actual transactions occurred in stores. With the CDP, the company was able to see and understand new consumer preferences, needs, and behaviors so marketing could be personalized, and communications via email and social media could be more frequent and more targeted. The results: a 30% uptick in revenue, better management of omnichannel supply chain inventories through predictive analytics, and an unwavering reputation for high-touch quality service.
eBay
Category: Data for operational excellence in record time
Modernizing data operations to increase agility and future-readiness
With 159 million buyers worldwide and 1.5 billion active listings as of Q2 2021, eBay depends on operational efficiency — particularly when it comes to managing its immense volumes of data. Recently, eBay decided to upgrade and modernize its data platform so it could consolidate data and applications and move them to a more agile cloud model.
In just three months, eBay replaced its 20-year-old data platform with a groundbreaking data service hub that is now integrating 300+ applications and core processes in multiple environments, including development, QA, product development, disaster recovery and other security functions. More than 120 applications were integrated and migrated to the cloud in just 87 days. eBay has already achieved a 30% reduction in transaction volume and cost savings by reducing the need for shadow IT — and the project is on track to be completed in less than half the time projected.
With the gains in agility, resilience, and process efficiency it’s already achieved, eBay is well on its way to transforming itself into a future-ready enterprise, with the ability to meet customer needs faster, respond to changing market conditions, and quickly integrate and analyze data from many sources. 
SNCF with its partner, Capgemini
Category: Data for customer centricity
Building a reputation for reliable information, right on time
Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, the leading railway operator in France, pulled together multiple customer data sources so it could create more innovative services, faster. Now 5 million passengers per week at 3,000 stations get the information and assistance they need when and how they need it, so they can get where they’re going on time, every time.
With Talend and Capgemini, SNCF integrated more than 50 million customer records into a single platform. That made it possible to increase messaging to customers by 50% with the latest updates on schedules, fares, COVID requirements, and more.
SNCF also cut development time for new services to weeks rather than months and achieved 80-90% savings by reapplying Talend technologies to new use cases. The result: a stronger brand image and a better reputation for reliability.
PETRONAS
Category: Data for operational excellence
Accelerating PETRONAS’ Transformation towards a Data-Driven Organization through Disruptive Data Innovation
Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS) is a global energy and solutions partner, ranked amongst the largest corporations on Fortune Global 500®. As it moves towards becoming a data-driven organization, PETRONAS realizes the crucial need to harness the power of data to enable a more precise and timely decision-making and cohesive experience when users capture, curate and consume data.
To accelerate this journey, Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) as a single source of truth for data analytics was introduced. EDH provides an enterprise-wide data lake store, curation and processing platform that is designed to be the comprehensive solution to address the various needs of PETRONAS technology-digital and analytics requirements. EDH pools data from across PETRONAS integrated value chain, captures and curates the data and then makes it available for use everywhere in the organization.
Among other initiatives, PETRONAS leverages Talend’s unified tool for data integration, data quality and transformation to power up EDH in curating and managing the data, allowing PETRONAS to drive efficiency and innovation for its integrated value chain. Since 2020, the company has integrated 27 key digital projects aided by Talend, to-date. This allows scalability for enterprise analytics.
Vyaire Medical and its partner, Wavicle
Category: Data for exponential growth
Ramping up production agility to save lives in a pandemic
Vyaire Medical wasn’t preparing for a pandemic. In 2019, the company just wanted to bring more agility to the production of its ventilator product line. But COVID-19 proved to be the ultimate test of the company’s data-driven transformation. Vyaire passed with flying colors, scaling ventilator production 100x from 6 units per day to 600 per day—and saving lives in the process.
Getting the right data into the right people’s hands quickly was the key to success, and Talend was the key to modernizing Vyaire’s data capabilities. With the help of Wavicle, Vyaire harnessed Talend to integrate its ERP systems; align and cleanse ERP data; create a unified “golden record” for each customer, vendor, and product; and standardize its sales and reporting processes to help accelerate operations.
With its new cloud-based data integration solution, Vyaire can now analyze, report on, and react to changes in market conditions with unprecedented speed. For example, supply chain partners now get reliable reporting every 15 minutes with data that is healthy and trusted. As a result, Vyaire has breathed new life into its manufacturing capabilities—and met the huge spike in demand for life-saving medical equipment.
Orlando Utilities Commission with its partner, Keyrus
Category: Data for sustainability
Using data to help reduce energy and water consumption, improve operations
A prime directive for the Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) is to cut waste and excessive use of resources such as water and electricity in the Orlando area. A vital step on this journey, in the words of the OUC’s Meter Data Operations Manager, was to “stop throwing data away.”
By creating an innovative Meter Data Platform (MDP) with the help of its partner Keyrus, OUC was able to collect and analyze usage & instrumentation (IoT) data from more than 400,000 accounts. Orchestrated by Talend, the MDP has captured more than 25 terabytes of data in
a two-year period. Now OUC can quickly detect unusually high water and/or electricity use, leaks, and “wrong-day” irrigation usage that needs to be corrected. And by automating data collection from 15,000 service points, OUC has saved its staff more than 2,500 hours of manual data entry.
Among the results: fast access to quality data for utility engineering and operations to ensure reliable, efficient power and water services; a reduction in research time and processing on “no-communication endpoints” from 10 hours a week to 30 minutes week; implementation of 17 new use cases (business processes) utilizing data that had NEVER been available previously — and a substantial contribution to OUC’s conservation goal of 25%-50% reduction in water and energy usage per day.
Special Broadcasting Service (SBS)
Category: Data for customer centricity
Tuning in to viewer preferences through better data integration
SBS is Australia’s most diverse broadcaster, offering a multi-platform portfolio of TV, radio, and digital programs. And SBS knew its diverse data was important to improving viewership. But how do you bring together dozens of data sources, and how do you convert all that data into insights informing better programming and business decisions?
SBS selected Talend, along with its partners Snowflake and Tableau, to build a cloud data platform that could accelerate analysis and reporting on billions of records about consumer behaviors and preferences. The result: faster, better decision making about everything from programming to digital advertising campaigns.
Today the SBS cloud data warehouse has integrated 30-40 data sources and can handle 5 billion records. Reduced data redundancy has saved 20% or more on storage and compute resources. And there’s no more trade-off between quality and volume of data. It’s helped SBS to better understand its audiences leading to better and faster decisions on everything from programming to digital advertising.
Nomura Asset Management
Category: Data for overall efficiency
Accelerating development for greater trust and higher revenue
High-quality development work depends on high-quality data. To accelerate development speed without compromising on data quality, Tokyo-based Nomura Asset Management implemented Talend.
With Talend, the firm was able to facilitate development of a tracker system that increases the accuracy of data used for fund management. The use of Talend Data Integration helped development teams reduce the total programming workload, and Talend Studio provided a level of component reusability that increased efficiency and collaboration.
By dramatically accelerating development work, Talend made it possible for Nomura Asset Management to implement the new tracker system sooner, gain the trust of more investors, cut costs through higher efficiency, and boost sales and revenue for the company. 
Shelter with its partner, Qbase
Category: Data for good
Fighting the UK’s housing emergency with better data
More than 17.5 million people in the UK are living in overcrowded, dangerous, or unaffordable housing, and 250,000 people are unhoused. Shelter the UK’s leading housing and homelessness charity which exists to fight the devastating impact the housing emergency has on people and society, is using data in the fight against homelessness. With Talend and Qbase, the organization now has better data-driven insights at a lower cost, so they can do more with less.
Shelter has used Talend to integrate 14 income systems, 28 data feeds, and more than one million records, enabling the organization to better serve those in need. Shelter is now more effective at raising money, has better visibility into local housing stock, and has deeper connections with local landlords. Trusting these capabilities, the organization set an ambitious goal of recruiting an additional 250,000 supporters to help defend the right to a safe home.
Bavaria Film with its partner, QuinScape
Category: Data for new business opportunities
Automating data quality checks to accelerate business processes
Bavaria Film and its subsidiaries are an innovative and richly-positioned leader within Germany’s film and television branch with a pedigree stretching back 100 years. Its studios have been used to produce famous films ranging from Bob Fosse’s Cabaret to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory to Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. From a business perspective, Bavaria Film’s secret passion is data — because the company has seen the connection between high-quality data and better business results.
Recently, Bavaria Film partnered with Talend and QuinScape to consolidate its data and automate data quality checks so that it could accelerate business processes and open up new business opportunities. With Talend’s smart, automated data correction capabilities, Bavaria Film was able to check the quality of 7.2 million data entries per year, assuring high quality for 99% of its enterprise data while reducing throughput times by 90%.
With better information and data security for the processed data, Bavaria Film can now accelerate the modernization of its entire IT landscape with confidence and manage the environment centrally in an extremely flexible way. The result is an enormous acceleration of core business processes, giving Bavaria Film the opportunity to open up new fields of activity even during the pandemic.