Alation on Monday announced the next version of its data intelligence platform, featuring new data lineage capabilities and aimed at helping enterprises strengthen their data culture.
According to Alation, the new version of the data intelligence platform is expected to be generally available during the second quarter of 2024 and will focus on four key pillars: Its pillars include data search and discovery, featuring both traditional and generative AI, governance, including new data lineage capabilities, and literacy and leadership.
By combining these pillars, organizations can improve their data culture and more fully realize the value of self-service analytics and AI initiatives.
Meanwhile, culture is an important aspect of extracting value from data, said Matt Aslett, an analyst at ISG's Ventana Research. Without an enterprise-wide data culture, decision-making becomes difficult.
“There are countless data and analytics products and services available that promise to accelerate and improve data processing and analysis,” Aslett said. “However, adopting the world's best products will not help if an organization does not take steps to improve and refine its culture and business processes.”
In addition, Aslett continued, Alation focuses on the right concepts to help customers improve their data culture.
“While Alation’s four pillars of data maturity clearly align with the capabilities of the company’s data intelligence platform, they are also key aspects of Ventana Research’s creation of a data-driven agenda. “It's pretty much the same as what we think it is,” he said.
Alation, based in Redwood City, Calif., is a data catalog vendor whose companies include Atlan and Collibra. The company's data intelligence platform allows businesses to connect data from disparate sources, manage it for safe and secure use, and discover data products such as models and dashboards to inform decision-making. We can organize it so that we can provide it to you.
Recently, Alation announced a series of integrations with vendors and tools such as Apache Kafka, MongoDB, and Tibco Data Virtualization, aimed at expanding the breadth of Alation's data ecosystem.
Platform updates
Good data is essential to the success of analytics and AI. If the data feeding an application or model is wrong, the application or model is also wrong, leading to a lack of trust in the organization's data.
Therefore, data quality is not only a key element for accurate analysis, but also data reliability, which helps develop a company-wide data culture.
As a result, data lineage, which allows users to visualize the lifecycle of data across systems and business tiers within an organization, is a key aspect of Alation's latest data intelligence platform update.
Data lineage (vendors call it business lineage) helps ensure data quality. By tracing data back from its current state to previous use to its original source, users can determine if the data has maintained its quality or if it has been inadvertently modified for some reason and is no longer reliable. You can check whether
To foster the data trust needed to develop an enterprise-wide data culture, Alation's new business lineage capabilities include:
- Added data governance for protected data such as personally identifiable information and other sensitive data. This allows automation to reduce audit time and make data search and discovery processes more efficient.
- Increased transparency with data maps allows users to more easily view and understand their data journeys, as well as trace KPIs and other metrics back to the data source.
- Streamline error identification and correction processes to reduce development and maintenance costs.
Beyond business lines, new search and discovery capabilities are key to helping organizations build a data culture, according to Aslett.
Alation's new data search and discovery capabilities are powered by Allie AI, an intelligent search engine that incorporates the vendor's AI.
Allie AI's intelligent curation and automated documentation capabilities, which Alation announced in preview in October 2023, will enable users to search and discover data based on semantic search meaning and keywords.
Meanwhile, data lineage and data discovery work together to help facilitate self-service analytics by providing business users with access to trusted data.
“When providing self-service access to data, businesses can help business users and data analysts find the data they need, make sense of it, and ensure it is valid, current, and reliable for business decisions. We need to ensure that we can trust that there is,” Aslett said. Said.
As a result, three-quarters of companies will make data intelligence a priority over the next three years, he continued.
“The latest enhancements to Alation’s data intelligence platform, including AI-powered data discovery and curation and improved data governance and data lineage, provide a contextual understanding of data and improve the data that users have access to. It's designed to make sure you can trust it,'' Aslett said.
Updates to Alation's data intelligence platform go beyond data lineage and search and discovery to target data literacy and data leadership to build a data culture.
The vendor's new data literacy features include a modern interface that users can customize to help them understand their data, and contextual metadata capabilities that provide explanations and insights related to how data and data products are used.
This update supports Leadership with Alation Analytics, a suite of visualizations that shows a company's entire data usage so leaders can quantify which data initiatives have the most impact. Additionally, Alation Analytics provides data maturity assessment tools so leaders can understand how their organization's data operations compare to those of similar organizations.
Meanwhile, the impetus for focusing on data culture came from a combination of customer feedback and Alation's observations about the state of data management and analytics, said Diby Malakar, the company's vice president of product management.
In particular, he noted that increasing reliance on cloud-based capabilities and focusing on AI development is proving difficult for many organizations.
“The path to successfully deploying and scaling these technologies and achieving a measurable return on investment is full of challenges,” Malakar said. “Employees must not only have access to data, but also be able to understand, trust, and leverage data effectively. Collaboration and data literacy across the organization is critical to successfully navigating this complex data landscape. It’s an essential step.”
next step
As Alation evolves, one of its areas of focus will be developing a broader network of partners, Malakar said.
In addition to announcing new partnerships last month, the vendor expanded its partnerships with DBT Labs and Databricks in April 2023, and added three more partnerships in October 2023. Alation plans to add partnerships and integrations with other vendors in the future.
Beyond the partnership network, AI is a focus of Aration's roadmap, Malakar said. In particular, features are being developed to help customers find relevant data faster and collect large amounts of data efficiently.
Meanwhile, Aslett said Alation would be wise to focus on enabling analytical operational processes to support its technical focus on data intelligence.
To achieve this objective, the vendor has developed Alation Analytics, which includes a set of benchmarking tools. But Aslett says vendors can do more to provide process insights, such as automated responses to data pipeline requirements.
“Data intelligence has the potential to provide a holistic view of data production and consumption,” he said. “This must also encompass his AnalyticOps processes and practices that support data consumption. AnalyticsCloud has the potential to have enhanced capabilities to automate analytical operations.”
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with over 25 years of experience. He is responsible for analysis and data management.