We created the following reviews after conducting an in-depth briefing with each vendor. Our analysis focuses on each product’s key differentiators and is designed to help companies create a short list of products to evaluate. We feel this is the appropriate role of a research firm rather than to rank and rate vendors, which is a slippery slope for many reasons.
Alation
In 2012, Alation launched a pioneering data catalog geared to business users and analysts keen on gaining self-service access to enterprise data. Since then, the company has expanded the footprint of its user-friendly, collaborative data catalog to support multiple use cases that rely on timely access to curated metadata. Still a private company, Alation has more than 650 employees and 350 customers in 32 countries and is a top-rated data catalog provider among industry analyst firms.
In September, 2021, Alation jumped deep into the data governance space when it released a separately-priced application that supports nearly all the components in Eckerson Group’s data governance platform framework. Alation’s data catalog and AI/ML engine serve as the foundation for its new data governance capabilities. Together, the catalog and data governance package support a range of capabilities, including a policy center, a stewardship workbench, a business glossary, built-in workflows, data quality flags, and a data governance dashboard and portal. Given the rich array of features out of the box—more than most other vendors we’ve examined—it’s not surprising that Alation claims it already has 50+ customers for the new product.
Demo
youtu.be/EynNaU_7GE0
Ataccama
Headquartered in Toronto, Ataccama offers a comprehensive and organically grown data management and governance platform geared to both business and technical users. Founded in 2007, the company in recent years has committed to faster growth through increased funding. Today, the company has a much higher profile, thanks to bigger investments in sales, marketing, and partnerships. With customers in 134 countries, Ataccama has become a go-to platform for organizations that want an easy-to-use, modular, integrated solution to manage data.
Ataccama ONE is the company’s all-in-one platform that supports everything from data quality, data cataloging, business glossary, data lineage, and data profiling to data integration, data access management, master data management, reference data management, and recently, data visualization. The company packages these capabilities into three separately priced modules which customers can distribute across on-premises and cloud environments to support data residency and privacy requirements. In 2021, Ataccama shipped a new version of its platform which uses machine learning, AI, and shared metadata to automate many common data management and governance tasks. With a freemium service and subscription pricing, Ataccama ONE deserves a close look from any organization that wants a business-friendly solution to improve the quality and governance of its data.
Demo
youtu.be/Fd1U8uxnZd8
Atlan
Founded in 2019, Atlan’s goal is to become “the Salesforce for Data Teams”—an intelligent, unified environment for managing data. The company is pioneering the use of active metadata to help data teams automate the activities required to manage and secure enterprise data. Atlan turns metadata about source data, queries, reports, models, code snippets, and data pipelines into automated recommendations, alerts, and actions that streamline data curation and data management processes. This avoids the problem of traditional data catalogs whose static metadata is manually curated and confined to the catalog, leading to long implementation times and low adoption rates. Atlan considers itself a “third-generation data catalog.”
Atlan founders developed the technology to address data collaboration challenges they faced when building large-scale production environments for more than 200 clients. They say the tools made it possible for them to deliver twice the data quality in half the time with one-third the people. The tools include a metadata lake built on open APIs and a knowledge graph; programmable “bots” that let data teams customize machine learning algorithms; customizable workflows to automate curation tasks; metadata that can be embedded in business applications; and metadata-driven integration with collaboration tools, such as Slack, JIRA, and email. Organizations that want to improve data quality, consistency, and compliance through customizable workflows and automation functions should consider Atlan.
Demo
youtu.be/5jaIKxODsps
BigID
Founded in 2016, BigID introduced a modern data intelligence platform that is still the gold standard in the data governance space. Based on graph technology and powered by machine learning algorithms, BigID excels in the quantity and diversity of its data connectors and its library of classifiers that automatically find, tag, and relate data elements. BigID’s data discovery foundation also includes policy management and the ability to build custom classifiers, all in a unified catalog. BigID can extract metadata from a large variety of both structured and unstructured sources, including documents, spreadsheets, images, and email. Its out-of-the-box classifiers can identify and tag numerous data elements, from social security numbers, street names, and passport IDs to personal information. The product is geared to enterprises with diverse sources and types of data that want to classify and catalog their data assets for analytics and privacy/security use cases.
Originally geared to privacy and security solutions, BigID has extended its data intelligence platform in recent years to support data governance – all based on a foundation of ML-driven, data-centric discovery. It now has applications to support data quality, policy management, data stewardship, a business glossary, data access intelligence, and data retention. Recognizing its superior data discovery functionality, other data catalog vendors interface with BigID, including Alation, Collibra, Informatica, and Microsoft Purview. Investors have signaled their confidence in BigID’s data discovery innovation with $285 million in funding. The company now has 440 employees.
Demo
youtu.be/JHOkyYOSoq0
Collibra
Founded in 2008, Collibra shipped the first commercial business glossary, making it a pioneer in commercial data governance software. Since then, Collibra has done a great job of capitalizing on rising interest in data governance by offering a comprehensive set of data governance capabilities that aligns with Eckerson Group’s framework. It has 1,000+ employees and 500+ customers that span all industries and geographies, and it has raised almost $600 million in investment funds, giving it a whopping valuation of $5.25 billion.
Based in Brussels, Collibra last year experienced growing pains as it added almost 400 new employees to keep pace with breakneck customer growth and absorbed another company, OwlDQ, to improve its data monitoring capabilities. Going forward, the company is focused on helping customers achieve success by upscaling its onboarding, education, and training services. It has also enhanced its core capabilities in data lineage, policy management, customizable workflows, and privacy management. Collibra is a good choice for customers that need a pureplay data governance solution to complement existing data management tools.
Data.world
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, data.world offers a software-as-a-service data catalog built on a knowledge graph. Founded in 2015, the company spent its initial years building an open data catalog, which now support 1+ million users who access more than 500,000 data sets. It then used this technology to design a commercial product that has earned kudos for its ease-of-use, transparent pricing, collaboration features, and built-in, context-sensitive query engine. Interestingly, data.world is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) that balances a social mission of facilitating the use of open and linked data with a commercial enterprise. The company has 60+ customers, raised $132 million, and received a hefty 52 patents with 27 pending.
data.world’s graph engine provides a powerful search experience. When a user types a term into the search bar, the platform surfaces a range of assets prioritized by social signals like usage and connectedness to other assets. Users can restrict their search to internal assets, or supplement it with assets from data.world’s open data community. Once users find the right asset, they can query the data using a built-in query editor and contextual metadata. Users can download the results of the query, open it in a BI tool, or perform simple visualizations in the data catalog. data.world is ideal for companies that need a flexible and extensible data catalog with rich data governance functionality and are comfortable keeping all their metadata in the cloud.
Demo
youtu.be/5sdZqYHU1RQ
Informatica
Informatica is the leading, independent data management vendor on the market, a position it’s held for many years. Leveraging its deep roots in data management, Informatica shipped its first, integrated, cloud-native data governance platform in July 2021. Given its large installed base and the strong market interest in integrated governance solutions, it’s no surprise that Informatica already claims more than 75 customers for the cloud-native solution. Called Informatica Cloud Data Governance & Catalog, the solution is ideal for existing Informatica customers as well as any organization that wants an enterprise-caliber data stewardship solution with infinite extensibility and the ability to integrate metadata from multiple data catalogs.
The new solution is part of Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud, which supports an extensive list of data services, ranging from data integration and data quality to master data management and a data marketplace. The solution leverages integrated data cataloging, discovery and automated classification capabilities that are powered by Informatica’s AI-powered engine, Claire, which automates many data management and governance tasks and recommends actions. A strength of the solution is its advanced data scanners that extract metadata from almost any data source and AI/ML models and captures detailed lineage data that elude other governance products.
Demo
youtu.be/XYchLgfiGHw
infoVia
infoVia is a data access management vendor that offers a lightweight approach to governing access to enterprise data. Rather than intercept and rewrite SQL queries using an external engine, the company’s product, infoSecur, adds a dozen governance tables to relational databases that embed policies that administrators create using a low-code visual interface. This simple, SQL-based approach provides cell-level security against large volumes of data and large numbers of concurrent users. The product makes it easy to change permissions, optimize queries, and add policies dynamically, and it integrates with any and all identity access management systems and business intelligence tools. The product comes with a variety of off-the-shelf policies that administrators can apply to any combination of user, role, and data, including policies for masking, filtering, and de-identifying data. Administrators can also create their own policies.
Demo
youtu.be/0JPqZCvcD5M
OneTrust
Founded just six years ago, OneTrust has become a behemoth in the privacy, security, and data governance market. It currently has 12,000 customers, including 75% of the Fortune 100, holds 200 patents, and has raised $920 million, giving it a whopping $5.3 billion valuation. The key to OneTrust’s rapid rise is an integrated, AI-driven automation platform that addresses almost the entirety of an organization’s governance and compliance requirements across various functional areas, regions, and industries. OneTrust is ideal for organizations that need a comprehensive data governance platform along with an integrated suite of privacy, security, and compliance capabilities.
OneTrust offers solutions in four main areas: privacy and data governance; governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and security assurance; ethics and compliance; and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability. The most popular of these is privacy and data governance, which offers most of the capabilities in Eckerson Group’s data governance platform framework. It’s based on a data discovery engine that automatically classifies and tags data assets and a policy management system that automatically generates policies, terms, and definitions based on a company’s profile and OneTrust’s knowledge of various regulatory frameworks and laws.
Demo
youtu.be/FpSZaznB_wA
OvalEdge
Founded in 2013, OvalEdge offers one of the most mature and comprehensive data governance platforms on the market that offers high degree of automation due to its use of active metadata. The product ships standard data governance capabilities, such as a data catalog, but surpasses other offerings with its support for data quality monitoring and remediation, data access governance, policy and compliance, data lineage, and automation. OvalEdge employs algorithms that auto-build a business glossary, lineage, and entity-relationship diagrams along with a built-in workflow and assignments engine to manage data quality issues and data literacy. Its algorithms can also automatically certify that a data asset matches glossary definitions and meets data quality criteria.
OvalEdge has almost 100+ customers, with most in healthcare, financial, and tech industries. It counts large hospitals and global financial services firms as customers. The product is best suited to customers that want standard, out-of-the-box governance capabilities. Current customers value the product’s ability to rapidly address users’ unique needs and remediate issues in a timely manner. They also prize the product for its intuitive user interface, native connectors, column-level lineage, one-click impact analysis, modular architecture, automated classifiers, fast deployment times, and affordable, user-based pricing. OvalEdge offers on-premises, SaaS, and public cloud versions.
1:1 Interview with Sponsor
youtu.be/y97hsKkZxzI
Promethium
Promethium is the brainchild of Kaycee Lai, former president of Waterline Data, an early data catalog company. Lai discovered that data catalog customers wanted to access and manipulate actual data, not just metadata, and were frustrated that they couldn’t with existing catalogs. Lai formed Promethium to turn a data catalog into a bonafide self-service analytics platform that blends discovery and governance with a low-code, no-ETL development environment to create data sets that answer business questions. Founded in 2018, Promethium has hundreds of product users, 30 employees, and received $34.5 million in funding. It’s ideal for companies that want to implement a self-service strategy that reduces or eliminates the persistent bottleneck between business users and an enterprise data team. Promethium’s goal is to deliver answers to business questions in minutes with one-tenth of the resources.
The product, Data Navigation System, supports a seamless workflow between business users, data analysts, and data engineers. It enables business users to pose natural language (NL) questions and receive answers from existing results or auto-generated queries using Promethium’s AI engine that skips the traditional ETL process. They can also assign their question to a data-savvy analyst or data engineer who uses the product’s data discovery platform to find appropriate data sets, build federated queries, prepare the results, and deliver a visual representation to the requesting user. Customers can use the product to build virtual or physical data pipelines, manage code in a GIT repository, and convert federated queries into dbt jobs for scheduled execution. The company offers both a freemium and commercial edition of the product.
Demo
youtu.be/XNZ9hlQcNXo
SAP
SAP Data Intelligence Cloud is a cloud-native solution for handling data governance and data integration tasks. It supersedes SAP’s on-premises offerings for data governance (SAP Information Steward) and data integration (SAP Data Services) and will be the focal point for SAP’s innovation in the space going forward. For on-premises customers that want to migrate to the cloud, SAP offers a bridge to SAP Data Intelligence Cloud so customers can retain all the rules, metadata, templates, and work they developed in the on-premises products.
Within SAP Data Intelligence Cloud, the Metadata Explorer module contains SAP’s data governance features, which are built around SAP’s Unified Data Catalog. The catalog crawls all data sources—both SAP and non-SAP—as well as streaming data. Users can search for data sets and reports based on numerous attributes. It also supports a business glossary, data lineage, user ratings, and auto-classification via rich tagging. The platform makes it easy to profile data and create data quality rules without scripting. Users can also create and schedule tasks and monitor their execution.
SAP Data Intelligence Cloud also contains robust data integration capabilities for both business users and data engineers. Its data preparation features, which are part of the Metadata Explorer module, enable business users to clean and enrich data, join tables, fix failed records, and modify data preparation “recipes”. Its data engineering features handle complex ingestion, transformation, and load procedures. SAP Data Intelligence Cloud is ideal for existing SAP customers but since the platform works with any data and runs in the cloud, it’s also an option for non-SAP customers.
1:1 Interview with Sponsor
eckerson.wistia.com/medias/70smv47pks
Zaloni
Founded in 2007, Zaloni started life as a big data vendor whose Spark-based data management platform was designed to build and manage data pipelines and deliver high-quality data to business users. Several years ago, it discovered that its core value for customers was governing data pipelines and data assets. As a result, the Durham, North Carolina-based company pivoted its strategy and now offers a unified data governance platform called Arena. Today, Zaloni is one of the few software providers that provide both an enterprise data governance platform as well as a data management environment for ingesting, processing, and provisioning data. Arena runs on-premises or in the cloud and can support hybrid and multi-cloud data environments.
Zaloni Arena was built to classify, catalog, and manage access to all enterprise data assets, including reports, documents, digital assets, and ML/AI models. Its data catalog uses AI/ML to auto-classify data assets and harmonize duplicate data. The platform contains an easy-to-use search function that makes it easy for business users to find data assets, including text within documents. The product is ideal for large companies with multiple, autonomous data domains that want to share data in a governed manner. To support this data mesh architecture, Zaloni’s data marketplace makes it easy for business users to shop for data products and for domain owners to package and provision data in a secure, efficient manner.
Demo
youtu.be/A-QI84vb0sQ