Alation details information intelligence strategy

Data quality, a subset information intelligenceis a topic that worries many business leaders – with 82% data quality as an obstacle for businesses. How do you choose from the many data quality solutions available in the market with different approaches?

Alation’s CEO and co-founder Satyen Sangani said today’s announcement Alation Open Data Quality Initiative Modern Data Collection (ODQI) is designed to provide customers with freedom of choice and flexibility in selecting the best data quality and observable data providers to meet the needs of modern, data-driven organizations.

Alation’s Open Data Quality Framework (ODQF) opens the Alation Data Catalog for any data quality vendor in the data management ecosystem and modern data collection. Initially, data quality and data monitoring providers such as Acceldata, Anomalo, Bigeye, Experian, FirstEigen, Lightup and Soda, as well as industry partners including Capgemini and Fivetran, joined.

Some of them were already partners of Alation, while others are new and are drawn to the idea of ​​having a standard to unite around. The company hopes that ODQF will become a de facto standard.

From information catalogs to information intelligence

With experience in economics and financial analytics and product management at Oracle, Sangani founded Alation in 2012. However, the company remained anonymous until 2015, working with several customers to determine what the product was and what the company was. to really achieve and for whom.

Sangani’s experience helped Alation’s approach as well. He said selling large packages to large companies to help them analyze their data resulted in companies not really understanding the data:

“It’s going to take two years, hundreds of millions of dollars … and a lot of that time has been spent trying to figure out which systems have the right data, how the data is used, what the data means,” Sangani said. “There were often numerous copies of the information and conflicting notes. People who understood systems and information models were often outside the company. ”

Data modeling, diagrams, and the like were to present the problem of knowledge management rather than a technical problem. Sangani says he believes that in addition to aspects of human psychology, he combines the didactic aspect in terms of teaching and teaching people how to use quantitative reasoning and reasoning.

Over time, the trajectory of Alation has been linked to a number of terms and categories. The most prominent of these include metadata management, data management, and data cataloging. Today, however, Sangani says the three come together in a wider market space: what it was in the beginning Identified as information intelligence by IDC.

In the years since Alation launched in 2015, the company has been trying to create a data catalog category that is new to many, according to Sangani. Later, other players from metadata management and data management began to unite to create a data catalog.

In parallel, the schedule from 2012 to date includes technological developments such as the democratization of big data through the Hadoop ecosystem, as well as the adoption of regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. All of this has played into the need to create inventory to make it easier for people to access information, which Alation considers a competitive distinction.

Alation as a platform for data quality

The data catalog for Alation is a platform for a broader category of information intelligence. Sangani says there are many components to information intelligence: basic data management, confidentiality information management, reference data management, data transformation, data quality, data observation, and more. Alation’s strategy is not, as Sangani puts it, “to have a box of each of these things.”

“The real problem in this space is not whether you have the ability to mark information. The biggest problem is engagement and adoption. Most people do not use data properly. Most people have no idea what information is available. Most people don’t deal with data. Most of the information is undocumented, “Sangani said.

“The idea of ​​an information catalog is really to engage people in information sets,” he said. But if this is our strategy, if it is to attract attention and focus on adoption, it means that there are some things that we are not doing strategically. ” “What we don’t do is create an information quality solution. What we don’t do is create a basic data observation solution or data management solution. ”

Alation considered expanding its offer in the data quality market, but decided against it. It is a fast-moving, densely populated market, and approaches to solutions can vary widely. Sangani said there was no difference in mass competition beyond the information in Alation’s catalog. Sangani added that sharing could turn Alation into a data quality platform, and the Open Data Quality Initiative aims to achieve that.

However, whether the standards live up to it really depends on customer acceptance, Sangani said. This initiative is a continuation of Alation’s Open Connector framework, which allows third parties to create connectors for metadata for any information system.

Plumbing as a basis for value-added applications

Sangani said Alation will continue to build open integrations and frameworks over time, as there must be a consistent way to share metadata in the world of data management. In a way, Sangani added, what Alation has built is now plumbing, and the ODQF is more of an example of plumbing.

However, while plumbing is important, the company has already begun to raise the bar to offer value-added features. For example, to use natural language processing (NLP) to make name subject recognition for recommendations, or to allow people to write sentences in English and translate them into SQL to perform an interactive query of a questionable data set.

Sangani relied on technologies such as knowledge graphs, AI and machine learning as ingredients to build a smarter information intelligence layer.

“I’m probably more excited about what we can do in the next five years than we’ve done in the last five years, because it’s all laying the groundwork for some really great applications that we’re starting to see.” in the near future, “he said.