Bi3 Solutions Embeds Talend’s Data Integration Technology to Power Cloud-based Social Media Intelligence Applications

LOS ALTOS, Calif.--Talend, a global open source software leader, today announced that Bi3 Solutions, the leading provider of Decision Intelligence Solutions, has embedded Talend Integration Suite inside its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to ensure that their applications can process and extract content from high-volumes of social media data.

Bi3 Solutions’ data analytics applications help improve customer service by quantifying customer feedback and making it easier to understand customer sentiment. Given the explosive growth of social media, Bi3 began deploying applications that extract content from social media channels. These applications filter through real-time media streams from sites like Twitter and Facebook, locating and tagging specific topics of interest to help customers gain a real-time understanding of how their brands are faring in the social media realm at any given moment. Transitioning its focus to social media, however, brought new infrastructure challenges, such as a drastic increase in the quantity of data to manage.

“In the past, we had to manage a limited amount of data flowing through a Customer Relationship Management or other in-house operational system,” said Thomas Groh, co-founder of Bi3 Solutions. “In social media, the volumes being churned out are much larger – almost infinite, creating so called ‘Big Data’ challenges. Developers need to ensure that their applications had the ability to process and make sense of thousands of tweets and posts per second, and for more than one customer at a time.”

Also critical to the success of Bi3’s applications was the ability to support a hybrid and highly distributed architecture. Because Bi3 runs in the Cloud and extracts data from multiple sources, its system features many individual nodes—all of which have a constant flow of data arriving. If a node were to fail for some reason, the application needed a way to hold on to incoming data during downtime and then continue processing as soon as the node was functional again.

Bi3 selects Talend’s open source data integration platform for Big Data

With real-time content analytics as its primary selling point, Bi3 knew that its application infrastructure hinged on a solid data integration platform. From the outset, Bi3 developers were drawn to Talend Integration Suite over alternatives from other providers such as IBM and Informatica. The company opted to partner with Talend through its OEM program, “Powered by Talend,” applying the technology at the core of its newly revamped Integrated Decision Optimization Center (IDOC) platform.

“Talend offered the leading data integration capabilities for our SaaS cloud-based Bi3 Solutions application, was the most mature product in the space, and provided a lot of room for us to grow our solutions over time,” said Eric Miles, CEO of Bi3 Solutions. “In addition, their OEM program is clearly designed for a company like ours, offering us the flexibility we need and a price model that does not destroy our competitiveness.”

Due to its real-time integration and execution capabilities, Talend’s Big Data integration ensures that Bi3’s Decision Intelligence applications have the performance capacity to handle vast, ongoing data streams at high speeds. For example, the Twitter Sentiment Analysis application can comb through every message as it’s generated on Twitter, filter them all based on a customer’s desired search terms, and then tag them.

Scalable Talend platform awaits future growth of Bi3 applications

While Bi3 only recently began rolling out its social media analysis applications, the company has several customers currently engaged and another 40 on the horizon over the next 12 months. In addition, the company plans to extend its applications’ social media coverage to include analysis of YouTube content, which – according to Wikipedia -- is added at the rate of around 48 hours of video every minute.

“We feel very comfortable that as we continue to scale up and add new capabilities, we’ve chosen a platform from Talend that covers us, no matter what’s coming,” added Miles.