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Founded in 1880, Elsevier has evolved from a small Dutch publishing house devoted to classical scholarship into an international information analytics business.

Now part of RELX Group, Elsevier has become the world’s largest provider of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information, publishing 16 percent of all scientific articles globally. Consumers of this information include researchers, physicians, surgeons, pharmacists, librarians and nurses. In all, Elsevier serves 20 million healthcare professionals, and approximately 12 million users access its online full-text research platform, ScienceDirect, each month.

Nearly three million unique authors worldwide contributed to almost 1.4 million Elsevier journals in the three years ending in 2015. Elsevier estimates that number to be almost 30 percent of active researchers globally.

Transitioning to a digital worldToday, 79 percent of Elsevier revenue comes from digital products. In 2016, 29 articles a second were downloaded. Annually, the company publishes 420,000 peer-reviewed research articles. Governments, research institutions and nursing schools use Elsevier decision-support platforms to inform strategy and policy, and scientific and medical communities exchange information regularly on its scholarly networks.

As its transition to a digital world gained speed, the company realized it needed to provide information and process data much quicker while staying in compliance with regulations such as GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation) and SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act).

For a complex, global, data-intensive business like Elsevier, it was an ongoing challenge to continuously integrate data sources and streams with new testing and development frameworks. The company was finding it difficult to scale integration using its existing solutions because there were so many of them spread across a wide range of business units. The goal for Elsevier’s Data Insights & Integration department was to support faster decision-making and integration requirements both within the company and for its customers, but the time and resources necessary to complete integration projects was slowing progress toward that goal.

“We recognized the need for an enterprise-wide integration solution, so we started by asking for requirements from stakeholders and compiling a list of upcoming integrations,” says Vipul Vyas, Development Manager, Data Insights & Integration, Elsevier. “We then scored different tools on a matrix, did proof-of-concept testing on a short list, and reached our decision to go with Talend.”

Why Talend?Vipul says the key deciding factors in Talend’s favor were Elsevier’s commitment to use open-source, community-based tools like Talend; the fact that there was a large, stable enterprise backing Talend software; and that Talend offers a flexible licensing arrangement that provides cost-savings and simplified administration. “In addition, we knew the number of pre-built connectors that Talend offers would shorten development time. Elsevier being a diverse organization, we wanted an integration tool which can handle a wide array of data and data source types. Also, our existing team has very strong Java skills, which made Talend the right fit, ” says Vyas.

Making internal operations an open book

“With Talend, we now can closely track journals and books throughout their lifecycle and more effectively schedule resources to streamline production and support marketing.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Media & Entertainment

INFORMATION• HQ: The Netherlands • 501-1,000 employees

USE CASE• Operational Reporting

CHALLENGE• Transitioning to a digital world

TALEND PRODUCTS USED• Talend Data Integration

• Multi-Cloud: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud

RESULTS

• 35 disparate systems integrated

• Access to 50 years of data

”Vipul Vyas, Development Manager, Data Insights & Integration, Elsevier.

Elsevier deployed Talend on AWS, but kept the deployment architecture “cloud-provider agnostic” to allow horizontal scaling in multiple cloud environments. “As part of our directive to stay flexible, we don’t want to tie ourselves to a single cloud provider,” says Vyas. With Talend, the company is currently using a federated Talend architecture used to integrate data into three corporate data warehouses and two key master data management systems, in addition to the 50-plus other integrations supporting the back office. “We wanted a single platform we could use across multiple business units so that units wouldn’t engage in ‘shadow IT’ and buy their own tools,” he says. “So, we’re very happy with the way Talend has enabled us to scale up and meet the needs of the business as a whole.”

Vyas says Talend toolsets have allowed them to create completely automated build and test pipelines, which has helped to stream the CI/CD processes within the integration space. That, in turn, greatly accelerates the process and optimizes the company’s development resources while ensuring high standards of quality. “The technology footprint is vast in Elsevier. Having a tool in hand with a huge list of connectors has helped us quickly turn around complex integrations and work on a vast array of integration patterns,” he says. “Having more automation in place means we can do more integrations more quickly with the same in-house resources. And that means we can turn things around quicker and give stakeholders a wider range of business benefits in short order.”

Business systems integration, customer insights and sales analyticsOver the course of the past 18 months, Talend has become the strategic platform for system integrations and data consolidation into the core analytical systems. Talend is used for loading data into warehouses for key sales, operations and customer insights reporting.

Another example of a Talend-powered database is the Business Intelligence system, which enables managers to closely track journals and books throughout their lifecycle and more effectively schedule resources to streamline production and support marketing.

Many Elsevier business units also benefit from Talend’s ability to rapidly move data from the company’s CRM into fulfillment systems. “Talend is the key integration technology for our master data management systems, which manage our products and customer master data,” says Vyas. “Talend integrates data from marketing, finance, sales, and e-commerce systems and integrates it into other key back-end systems.”

That large-scale project makes Talend the backbone of integration activities throughout the company. In addition, Elsevier has been able to decommission a number of technologies and platforms, which has resulted in significant savings in licensing and hosting costs. Implementing the Talend-based solution has also made the company more agile, which, in turn, enables it to deliver business value faster to a range of business units.

“We have the ability to predict the unpredictable. We can source information that we’re going to need, at any scale and at any frequency, while providing a level of self-service to our users that is unparalleled.”

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