Alation 2022.2 includes new framework that drives freedom of choice and flexibility for organizations; delivers quality data to data consumers at point of consumption

Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced that leading data quality and data observability providers such as Acceldata, Anomalo, Bigeye, Experian, FirstEigen, Lightup, and Soda, and industry partners including Capgemini and Fivetran, have joined Alation in support of its newly launched Alation Open Data Quality Initiative for the Modern Data Stack. The program provides customers with the freedom of choice and flexibility when selecting the best data quality and data observability vendors to fit the needs of their modern, data-driven organizations.

The Open Data Quality Initiative was designed to accelerate data governance and access to trusted self-service analytics for the broadest range of data consumers. Data quality is a top priority for organizations that are automating processes and creating new products and services using data. Alation’s Open Data Quality Framework (ODQF) opens up Alation Data Catalog to any data quality vendor in the modern data stack, and provides teams with unrivaled openness and interoperability that best suit their needs.

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“Data quality has been an intractable problem for decades,” said Sanjeev Mohan, recent Gartner research vice president. “Data catalogs have become the go-to source to discover, store, and act on metadata. As such, data catalogs are well-positioned to address the data quality problem today. Alation’s solution is unique, as it marries its state-of-the-art catalog with a choice of DQ partners for customers to choose from. This flexibility delivers the most optimal solution for a varied data and analytics landscape.”

“Our research shows that data quality is the most impactful data governance issue organizations face affecting 89% of survey participants,” said Dave Menninger, SVP and Research Director, Ventana Research. “Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative will help organizations more easily establish and maintain quality and trust in their data.”

“The data quality and data observability space is quickly evolving. Many vendors have developed solutions that fit the different and unique needs of our customers,” said Raj Gossain, Chief Product Officer, Alation. “The future of the modern data stack is interoperability and freedom of choice; organizations no longer need to invest in a single tool from a single company. That’s exactly why we are creating an ecosystem of best-of-breed data quality and data observability partners that interoperate with Alation. ODQF was created with our customers’ needs in mind. Now they have the option to pick one or several data quality and data observability vendors that best fit their organization’s requirements, while ensuring that Alation is the single source of reference for their comprehensive data intelligence needs.”

Alation’s ODQF partners will have access to a developer SDK that includes an open API, easily accessible documents via a developer portal, and partner onboarding tutorials with integration best practices. This integration provides data consumers with instant access to the data quality rules, metrics, and warnings they need across the broadest possible range of vendors, seamlessly integrated into the UX of the market-leading Alation Data Catalog.

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Alation 2022.2, available today, accelerates data governance capabilities. The business glossary features enhancements to the user interface and discoverability of glossaries and related business terms. The Stewardship Workbench within the Data Governance App includes new bulk actions for assigning and removing stewards, and updating custom fields, making compliance and auditing easier. The latest release also extends automated column level lineage to SQL Server to help diagnose critical issues.

“At Kestra Financial, we need confidence that we’re delivering trustworthy, reliable data to everyone making data-driven decisions,” said Justin Mikhalevsky, Vice President of Data Governance & Analytics, Kestra Financial. “We are excited about Alation’s interoperability with Bigeye as it gives all users, not just data engineers with technical expertise, a way to easily determine whether they can trust the data and use it right away.”

Supporting Quotes from Founding and Industry Partners:

“Acceldata supports Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative to centralize best-of-breed data observability information into Alation,” said Tristan Spaulding, Head of Product, Acceldata. “As the industry leader in multi-dimensional data observability, Acceldata will integrate unique operational data intelligence, including Airflow lineage into Alation, to enable our joint customers to eliminate pipeline blind spots and improve data reliability at scale.”

“With the growth of the Modern Data Stack, data quality has the potential to be a company’s Achilles’ heel,” said Elliot Shmukler, co-founder and CEO of Anomalo. “We’re thrilled to be one of the founding partners of Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative. Now organizations can set up data monitoring for any table in five minutes or less using Anomalo and see results directly in Alation. This allows anyone on the team to check that data is up-to-date, complete, accurate, and consistent—and get an automatic root cause analysis to understand any issues.”

“As a former data scientist, I know how much time is wasted and confidence is lost when stale or damaged data ruins an organization’s ability to trust their analytics,” said Kyle Kirwan, CEO and co-founder of Bigeye. “That’s why I’m so excited about Bigeye’s integration with Alation. Now, any data user can instantly get cues on whether data is stale or damaged, before they use it, because Bigeye automatically checks it for freshness, outliers, missing values, incorrect formats, and more than 60 other characteristics in the background.”

“We are keen supporters of Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative. Our customers need to be able to manage their data products, which includes allowing data consumers to self-serve trustworthy data,” said Steve Jones, Enterprise Vice President, Collaborative Data Ecosystems, Capgemini. “The catalog is the natural point for data consumers to discover data and to surface issues with data sources. This move by Alation helps our clients on their journey to becoming data-driven enterprises and enables them to collaborate internally and externally to drive new business.”

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“The data catalog has emerged as one of the most critical components of the modern data stack to help organizations build a trusted, organized, and actionable data set. Data quality is a fundamental practice; where combined with data cataloging, accelerates trust, organization, and activation of data,” said Ashley Knight, Vice President, Product Management and Marketing, Experian. “Experian has already partnered with Alation and a strategic client to enable data profiling through existing Alation functionality, and we look forward to continuing to partner with Alation on their open data quality initiative to bring best in class data quality to clients.”

“The Alation data quality API will allow any best-of-breed data quality tool to be leveraged by the customer without vendor lock-in,” said Angsuman Dutta, CTO, FirstEigen. “FirstEigen’s DataBuck will leverage this feature to communicate objective data trust scores and data errors for every table, automatically measured by our AI algorithms. DataBuck will also support data quality-related regulatory compliance requirements, such as CCAR reporting, from Alation using this API.”

“Fivetran is pleased to be a founding industry partner of Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative,” said Joseph DeBuzna, Vice President, Product Management, Enterprise & Databases Fivetran. “We know that successful and productive data engineering relies on top-quality data. We’re excited to take part in this new initiative because it will enable Fivetran and Alation customers to select the right data quality tools for their organizations and speed data processing.”

“Bad data has become a significant issue for businesses, creating operational inefficiencies and impacting business outcomes,” said Manu Banzal, CEO, Lightup. “Lightup’s integration with Alation enables end users to assess data quality from one central location. Now analysts and executives can trust analytics insights, knowing they are as good as the data that drives them. The Lightup integration surfaces data issues to the end user through Alation, enabling trust in data and business outcomes based on confirmed quality data.”

“The partnership between Alation and Soda brings an intelligent approach to data management,” said Maarten Masschelein, CEO & Co-Founder, Soda. “Alation is powered by Soda’s automated data quality insights, which enable data teams to easily find, understand, and trust the data they need. Both data users and producers are enabled by the real-time data dashboards to analyze the health of their data and automated lineage to troubleshoot quality issues and significantly speed up root cause analysis.”