Turn Data into Insights with ALATION

Data is everywhere. The 10th edition of the “Data Never Sleeps” report shows how much data is being created on the Internet. Every minute:

• 5.9M user queries are sent to Google
• 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube
• 347K tweets are posted on Twitter
• 1.7M pieces of content are posted on Facebook
• 231M emails are sent
• 16M text messages are sent
• $443K are spent by Amazon shoppers

Nowadays, organizations have countless tools to gather valuable information on customer behavior, transactions, or internal operations. The challenge comes with the ever-increasing flow of data, from multiple sources. According to Statista, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly, reaching 180 zettabytes in 2025.

Reports, data sets, tables, queries, conversations, articles… how does your organization store all the data you’re gathering, structure it and use it to gain insights and solve a business problem?

How do you go from intuitive decisions to data-driven decisions? 

This is what Alation set out to do in 2012, as a pioneer in the data catalog category. They developed a solution that gathers and catalogs data and makes it accessible to the entire organization.

Fast forward to 2022, Alation became a leader in data intelligence and achieved Centaur status by surpassing the $100M ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark. What started as a data catalog software now turned into a robust platform that includes data governance, data lineage, and data operations.

Alation combines the power of data with the brilliance of people. Machine learning, blended with human insight, is used to address complex data and metadata management challenges.

400+ enterprises from 34 different industries use Alation and report

• 67% faster time to insights
• 365% return on investment
• $2.7M in savings from fast data discovery

What are the top 5 Alation products?

Alation has 5 products that cover data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation:

1. Alation Data Catalog

A Data Catalog is a searchable collection of data and metadata that helps analysts find the information they need, understand the full context, and make informed decisions.

The core capabilities of a data catalog are:

• data search & discovery
• curation & governance
• collaboration & analysis

Alation offers an automated discovery of datasets, both for initial catalog build and ongoing discovery of new datasets. To get the most out of automation and reduce manual work, the platform leverages AI and machine learning for metadata collecting, semantic inference, and tagging.

Organizations that implement data catalogs report remarkable changes in the speed and quality of data analysis, and in the engagement and enthusiasm of people who need to perform data analysis.

The benefits include:

• Improved data efficiency
• Improved data context
• Reduced risk of error
• Improved data analysis

We can compare a modern data catalog to Amazon.com. You can search for a “product” — data, in this case, using keywords and natural language, you get relevant results, check out who else has been using that data and how trustworthy it is.

2. Alation Connectors

Alation has pre-built connectors for a wide variety of data sources: AWS, Azure, GCP, SAP, Oracle, SQL Server, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more. For less common data sources, developers can create new connectors using the Open Connector Framework SDK.

Users can run SQL queries against various data source types, including RDBMS, NoSQL, and application sources, from Alation’s built-in intelligent SQL editor.

3. Alation Platform

The platform has metadata management applications, covering search & discovery, analytics, data governance, digital transformation, privacy, risk & compliance.

The Behavioral Analysis Engine (BAE) improves all areas of the platform with advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Data can be found using natural language, and it is tagged as relevant or not, based on popularity indicators. Stewardship is streamlined with an emphasis on the most active data sets in empirical usage. Governance is surfaced in workflow through flags and suggestions about the relevant policies governing data assets.

The platform is built on a containerized architecture that guarantees performance, flexibility, and security. Alation can be deployed on-premise, private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid.

4. Alation Data Governance App

With the help of the Data Governance App, customers can create a framework for data governance, discover & curate assets, assign business stewards (or “masters of data”), apply policies and controls, collaborate with the other users, and track and evaluate governance and curation activities.

The Alation Data Governance App simplifies how organizations enable secure access to data, through

• Centralized policy management
• Automated stewardship and curation
• Governance workflow configuration right from the app, without coding or using 3rd party applications
• Monitoring and measuring progress on policy usage and open tasks

5. Alation Cloud Service

The Alation Data Catalog is now available also as a cloud service. Customers can choose to manage data on their own or have it done for them in the cloud, with zero administrative overhead.

Cloud service users benefit from new features as soon as they are released, because upgrades and patches are issued in a CI/CD (Continuous Improvement/Continuous Delivery) style.

The Alation Cloud service is designed with enterprise-grade security and cloud-native architecture, meeting the complex needs of large organizations.

To sum everything up, Alation provides a single source of truth for search and discovery across an enterprise. It’s like Google for data in your organization. It empowers users to make informed decisions, based on data, not intuition.

If you want to learn more, download TechRadar by Devoteam or talk to one of our experts today.