Data Cataloging for the masses

Alation, leader in data catalog for enterprises, was one of the very good session this week for the 30th edition of The IT Press Tour in California.

The company continues to be listed leader in various analysts reports such Gartner, Forrester, Dresner and Constellation indicating that Alation has a special value proposition with a real market traction. The key element now, introduced lat year with our visit, is the natural integration of machine learning intelligence as a default feature and not as an optional paid one. As data becomes clearly the new oil and currency on the globe, having a tool to extract, pump and inject data is clearly a huge advantage.

To fuel this acceleration, the company just raised a series-C of $50M for a total of $82M. The market is estimated to $5B.

But data is hard as sources vary, volumes explode and velocity grows with more and more applications to integrate and analytics to serve to users. It seems that we live a time like the gold rush but now we can call it the Data Rush.

The Alation solution is very powerful supporting lots of data format - both unstructured like files and structured with databases - with a rapid metadata extraction, data sampling, auto-titling with ML and NLP, query log ingestion and crowd- and expert-sourcing. Alation acts like a data hub coupling with its data layer different applications and tools. But it's all about speed to find data, build dashboard, display trends, reuse models and at the end to take decision, the right one.

With this session, we saw great progress and maturity from Alation, really confirming its leader position, meeting the company in 2020 would be good to see directions and how growth is managed as a company with a growing market pressure.