Alation branches out from data catalogs to analytics stewardship
Alation, a startup focused on cataloging data in the enterprise, is launching an analytics application within its Alation Data Catalog designed to enable stewardship and better governance.
Satyen Sangani, Alation CEO, said in an interview with ZDNet that the company was built on search and discovery for enterprise data repositories. "Enterprises didn't understand the data in their own systems. The irony was that they own the data, but don't understand it," explained Sangani.
That reality led to the Alation Data Catalog, which catalogs data found in various databases, repositories, file systems and business intelligence tools. Alation Data Catalog is designed to enable you to search for data across an organization.
Sangani said that the move to its Analytics Stewardship application is an extension of cataloging data. Via machine learning, Alation is aiming to find trends within an enterprise about how often a data set is viewed, popularity and logs, explained Sangani. From there, Alation will build a graph akin to a social graph. Alation will then tap humans with targeted questions to verify data.
The general idea is that the Alation features will make data governance more actionable across data warehouses, Snowflake, BI tools such as Tableau, operational systems and clouds and bottoms up compared to the usual top-down approach.
Alation's new Analytics Stewardship application and services include:
- A new Alation Policy Center, a single point for enterprise policies for use of data and analytics.
- Alation Catalog Sets, which automates policies across all connected data assets.
- Alation Stewardship Dashboards that create a feedback look between stewards, data assets and the broader company via gamification.
- Auto-Discovered Glossary, which extends Alation's Data Catalog with machine learning and suggests new business terms.
- A services unit to help data governance implementations.
Here are some screen shots: