Delivering on promise to connect to everything, Alation also announces Connected Sheets for Microsoft Excel and Alation Anywhere for Microsoft Teams

Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, announced Alation Marketplaces, a new product for third-party datasets to augment existing data in Alation Data Catalog for richer analysis. Additionally, the company expanded Alation Anywhere to Microsoft Teams and Alation Connected Sheets to Microsoft Excel to help data users access contextual information from the catalog directly within their tool of choice.

Leveraging third-party data can illuminate opportunities and risks that enterprises might otherwise miss with proprietary data generated from an enterprise’s own operations. The air travel industry, for example, is powered by a seamless flow of internally produced data on customers, fuel, and predictive maintenance. At the same time, access to external data, such as weather patterns, is critical to optimize the customer experience and streamline operational efficiencies. However, as the number of third-party data providers rapidly grows, sourcing reliable third-party data is increasingly time-consuming and challenging.

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Easily Discover External Datasets and Augment Data with Alation Marketplaces

Alation Marketplaces enables users to explore external third-party data from vendors like Snowflake, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and data.gov to supplement existing data in Alation Data Catalog. Now, users can quickly search and discover data from disparate solutions in a single, well-organized environment with easy-to-scan sample data. With Alation Marketplaces, everyone in an organization can conveniently find and integrate external data in a process that would otherwise be tedious and difficult.

“Alation Marketplaces allows us to become the champions of our data,” said Patricia Lendrum, senior data governance manager at RaceTrac. “We encountered a situation where we had a huge list of store locations with addresses, latitudes, and longitudes, but needed to know the county for tax purposes. Prior, our team was using Google Earth to manually enter coordinates individually to find the county. With Alation Marketplaces, we can easily find the datasets we need to automate county-mapping. These datasets saved tons of time for our employees and helped us avoid tax issues.”

“Augmenting enterprise data with external data can deliver exciting new insights,” said Aaron Kalb, Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder at Alation. “Previously, we’d only cataloged datasets within our customers’ data environments. With Alation Marketplaces, users can easily discover and explore a rich trove of relevant datasets, without searching several separate sites. With Marketplaces, we fulfill Alation’s vision to help people find the dataset they need, wherever it might be.”

Data Intelligence for Business Users

Alation furthers its promise to connect to widely used tools and applications. With Alation Anywhere for Microsoft Teams coming soon, business users and data teams can preview helpful metadata from Alation Data Catalog directly within Microsoft Teams and seamlessly collaborate with others, without disrupting their workflow. This expands on existing Alation Anywhere integration for Slack and Tableau. Additionally, Alation Connected Sheets now supports Microsoft Excel to help business users import trusted data in real-time from a variety of source databases into the most widely used spreadsheet tool.

Kalb adds, “Everyone in an organization should have access to trusted data, from data analysts and data scientists to business users. Yet, too often, business users can’t make data-informed decisions because they don’t know where to get trusted data or must rely on technical colleagues. We’re removing those obstacles by meeting all users where they already are — in the tools they’re most familiar with, from Microsoft Excel & Teams to Slack and Tableau.”

Alation Connected Sheets for Microsoft Excel and Alation Marketplaces are available immediately for existing customers, and Alation Anywhere for Microsoft Teams is coming soon.

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