Qlik Completes Acquisition of Talend

BI and analytics provider Qlik announced its intent to acquire Talend earlier this year, and now it has formally completed the deal, giving it an immediate boost in the data management department.

Data sprawl, data quality, and the overall fragmentation of the data landscape continue to be major impediments to success in data analytics and AI projects. To address these challenges, customers have been forced to either rely on incomplete legacy products, assemble multiple point tools, or standardize on public cloud stacks and subject themselves to lock-in, according to Qlik CEO Mike Capone.

But with the acquisition of Talend, Qlik is providing another path forward, one that positions the company as an end-to-end provider of data management and analytics and AI solutions, Capone says. “Today, I am proud to announce a new approach: a broad set of best-in-class solutions that are modern, proven, trusted, and continue to remain open and cloud agnostic,” the CEO writes in a blog.

The Talend acquisition nets Qlik, which has focused on the addition of AI and machine learning capabilities to its BI and analytics toolset, a collection of widely used data management tools, including ETL, data quality, data governance, and application and API integration, which are sold as point tools or as part of Talend Data Fabric. Talend also owns Stitch, a developer of shrink-wrapped tools for loading cloud data warehouses, which it bought for $60 million in 2018.

Mike Leone, the principal analyst for analytics and AI at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said that the combination of Talend and Qlik equals more than the sum of its parts.

“These are two market-leading companies that will enable their customers to benefit across the data and analytics lifecycle regardless of where they are in their digital transformation journey,” he said in a press release. “By marrying Qlik’s existing presence in the data integration space with Talend, customers will see more robust data integration capabilities and powerful data governance to deliver the confidence and trust they desire.”

Terms of the Talend deal were not disclosed by Qlik. Both companies are majority owned by Thoma Bravo, the massive private equity firm that undoubtedly brokered the deal.

Qlik was publicly traded until August 2016, when Thoma Bravo acquired Qlik for about $3 billion. In early 2022, Qlik filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commision for an IPO, but recent economic turbulence has put those plans on hold for now.

Talend was a publicly traded company when it was acquired by Thoma Bravo in March 2021 in a deal valued at $2.4 billion.

In addition to Qlik and Talend, Thoma Bravo’s portfolio includes about 70 other software companies that employee more than 90,000 people and generate $24 billion in annual revenue. Other current investments in the big data space include Alation, Dynatrace, Imply, LogRhythm, SolarWinds, and Starburst.

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