Talend, Informatica, SSIS, Oracle Data Integrator, SAP BODI, Ab Initio, IBM InfoSphere, SnapLogic… these tools helped data teams modernize in the early 2000s. In 2025, however, they are becoming barriers to agility. E-commerce, retail, finance, and even healthcare are moving away from them—not because they’ve stopped working, but because they were built for a world that no longer exists.
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Tools from a Different Era
Legacy ETL platforms were designed for centralized IT teams, monolithic systems, and overnight batch jobs. At the time, this approach made sense—enterprise processes moved slowly and predictably. But business today does not run in batches.
Data now flows in real time. It is needed not only by analysts and IT, but also by marketing, finance, operations, and product teams. Technology stacks are composed of dozens of SaaS applications that must integrate seamlessly. AI is no longer just powering dashboards—it is making decisions and triggering automation. While legacy platforms focused on centralized control, modern businesses require speed, flexibility, and the ability for business users themselves to trigger workflows.
Talend and its peers were not built for this reality. That is why they are increasingly showing their age.
From “Pipelines” to “Business Outcomes”
Modern data teams are not merely moving information from point A to point B. Their mission is to deliver outcomes. When customer records are enriched, the real impact comes from triggering dynamic pricing. An anomaly detection isn’t useful if it just appears in a report; it needs to alert finance and automatically reroute budgets. ERP data doesn’t add value if it just lands in a warehouse; it should generate an investor deck within minutes.
Legacy ETL tools were designed for engineers. Modern orchestration platforms are designed for business impact.
Shared Frustrations Across the Market
Whether organizations relied on Talend, Informatica, or SSIS, the stories were remarkably similar. Many teams discovered that despite the GUI, they still had to write custom code. Small changes could break dozens of jobs, slowing innovation to a crawl. Simple updates took days, while version upgrades stalled entire departments. Integration with SaaS tools was fragile, and CI/CD pipelines were missing or bolted on.
As one company said after moving off Talend: “It became a bottleneck. You think you’re getting an all-in-one platform, but you end up duct taping around its limits.”
Where It Breaks Down the Most
Industries that balance slow-moving core systems with fast-moving customer-facing applications hit the wall first. Retail and e-commerce can’t personalize offers when their data arrives only in batches. Finance teams cannot afford to build presentations manually when investors expect real-time updates. Marketing needs ERP data to flow instantly into Salesforce or HubSpot, not weeks later.
Modern orchestration platforms can stream, enrich, and activate data in real time. Finance departments can receive automated reports that are generated and delivered directly to stakeholders. New data products can be prototyped in days rather than months. Speed, modularity, and automation are now table stakes—and legacy ETL tools simply weren’t built for this pace.
Myths That No Longer Hold True
Several myths keep companies tied to their legacy platforms:
- Myth 1: An all-in-one platform saves effort. In reality, many companies end up combining Talend with custom scripts, Airflow, dbt, and other tools just to fill the gaps.
- Myth 2: Centralized control ensures better governance. More often, it creates bottlenecks that slow down business users who need to act quickly.
- Myth 3: Legacy ETL is cheaper than modern orchestration. Hidden costs—maintenance, onboarding delays, and lost innovation—often outweigh the licensing fees of new platforms.
Once these myths are debunked, the path to flexible orchestration becomes clear.
It’s Not Just About Tools, But About Mindset
This shift is not only technological—it is a change in operating model. Successful companies are moving from monolithic platforms to modular architectures where orchestration acts as the connective tissue.
The new mindset is built around composability, governed self-service, unifying batch and real-time in a single environment, Git-native workflows with CI/CD, and built-in observability and lineage. AI-powered agents are not just reporting anomalies but taking corrective action automatically.
These are no longer just “features”—they represent a new way of working with data.
Industry Spotlight: Keboola
One example of this transformation is Keboola, a data operations and orchestration platform used by more than 12,000 companies worldwide. Each month, Keboola automates 4.3 million DataOps jobs and 600,000 orchestration flows.
Finance teams use it to compress months of manual reconciliation and reporting into just a few hours. E-commerce companies rely on it to enrich customer data in real time and launch personalized campaigns. The platform combines technical depth (native support for dbt, SQL, and Python) with no-code tools, making it accessible to both engineers and business users.
In practice, Keboola operates as a data operating system: it integrates systems, automates processes, and turns data directly into business outcomes.
Saying Goodbye to Monoliths
Tools like Talend, Informatica, and SSIS played an important role in the past. They enabled enterprises to modernize and navigate the first wave of digital transformation.
Today, however, they have become liabilities. What once looked like advantages—visual development, centralized control, or the “all-in-one” approach—have turned into weaknesses. Versioning and debugging are painful, governance becomes a bottleneck, and the model no longer fits a cloud-first, SaaS-integrated, AI-driven world.
Many companies are now running legacy platforms alongside dbt, Airflow, custom scripts, and various SaaS connectors just to keep things working. If your “all-in-one” solution requires five additional tools to fill in the gaps, it’s time to rethink your approach.
Final Word: From Data Movement to Business Orchestration
The era when ETL defined modernization is over. In 2025, stakes are higher and the speed of business is faster. The new generation of orchestration platforms doesn’t just move data—it delivers outcomes. They can prototype products in hours, unify real-time and batch, integrate across clouds and apps, and deploy AI agents that automate not just alerts, but decisions.
In summary: legacy ETL served well, but today it slows companies down. Orchestration should be seen not as a technical function but as the backbone of business agility. Whether companies choose open-source frameworks, cloud-native platforms, or solutions like Keboola, one truth is clear: the monolithic ETL era is over.
FAQ
Does this mean Talend and similar tools have no use anymore?
Not entirely. They remain useful in environments dominated by batch processes and stable core systems. But for fast-moving, SaaS-first businesses, they are too rigid.
Isn’t adopting a modern orchestration platform more expensive?
Initial migration can require investment, but in the long term most organizations find that the hidden costs of legacy tools—maintenance, onboarding, and lost innovation—are far greater.
Where does Keboola fit into this picture?
Keboola represents the new generation of orchestration platforms. It blends technical depth with no-code accessibility, supports both real-time and batch processing, and empowers AI agents to not just analyze data but drive business outcomes.
