Layer2 Cloud Connector vs. Talend Open Studio (discontinued)

We had a scenario where our clients have thousands of external party vendors/committees who regularly sync SharePoint data. Managing thousands of external parties can never be possible without using a Layer2 cloud connector. We managed the local network sharing and SharePoint integration by using the Layer2 connector. Layer2 is convenient with a large amount of data as the per-user license is high.

For quick daily integrations Talend is a very good tool and it makes development time so short and easy. Citizen developers who are not great programmers can pick up and start using Talend Open Studio within weeks. It's well suited for all kinds of data migration between various systems. It is less appropriate for smaller synchronous services where you need to trace the complete transaction and how data moved between them. It's also less appropriate for small data movements where other tools can be easier to use and manage.

Incentivized

• Layer2 provides best connectivity with SharePoint
• It syncs local network shared files to the SharePoint
• Provides details file history

• Your developers will be able to design SOA services graphically, and it is very easy to document and implement the code.
• Talend Open Studio is based on Eclipse IDE, so your developers will be very comfy using it
• Open is Key in Talend Open Studio = Open Source

Incentivized

• Per User cost is expensive
• A lot of pre-requisites
• UI needs to be more user-friendly

• The community is not that up to date and forum is not that great in response. Probably we should make people aware of the tool more on how to use and its implementations.
• Talend crashes when transforming a lot of data (millions of rows).
• Proper training documentation is a must for talend which is currently lagging. This will help users to learn more about Talend and use it effectively.

Incentivized

There is no licence requirement for Talend Open Studio. So, this is not relevant question. However, if you are asking whether we will use Talend in future. Yes. We will continue to use it. It's very powerful free tool which caters to all our extra, transform, load capabilities. We just love Talend for it's great functionality and ease of use.

Incentivized

Talend Open Studio is based on Eclipse and is full of redundant procedures to do one thing, like when installing libraries. Sometimes I cannot manually download the libraries that it can't find.

Many times, Talend freezes. When you give a cancel command, it takes several minutes to stop. It also takes a great toll on our PC with 16 GB of ram and I7 CPU, even in idle status. If you are downloading Maven Jar/Libraries, you cannot do anything and have to wait until the task is finished.

Talend Open Studio is free and we are not using the enterprise version which comes with licence and support. So, mostly depend on the open source community for any issues that we face. The document is good and we didn't have to use any support so far. We did evaluate the enterprise version and so far sticking to the free version.

Incentivized

We had also used Microsoft One Drive as a syncing tool but it requires Office365 for managing and syncing data across thousands of vendors which was not practically possible to manage users on Office 365. Layer2 resolved this issue by having 3 user licenses and they are enough to periodically sync all external parties' data with our SharePoint online.

Informatica has a limited number of components that you can use. This places a heavy limitation on the capabilities of Informatica. On the other hand, Talend allows you to create your own custom components using Java. For businesses that need to perform a wide variety of data operations, it can be quite useful to have the option of creating your own custom components to satisfy business needs.

Incentivized

• Layer2 resolves the time management issue
• Resolved data syncing issues across different external vendors
• LOE optimisation with using Layer2 connector.

• I delivered projects the client did not believe were possible, and I provided intermediate value by providing visibility to hidden data problems in their systems they could not detect before.
• I was able to work 3 projects at a time, pausing gracefully in one while switching to the other, with minimal effort.

Incentivized