Data intelligence company Alation’s ALLIE AI co-pilot is now in public preview. The concept is pitched at AI engineers, data analysts and data stewards looking to increase productivity. An Analytics Cloud providing a visual map of an organization’s data usage is also in the offing.
Alation’s software catalogs or maps a customer’s data, reading metadata from sources such as file systems and databases via a host of connectors. It provides intelligence about the types of data, its location and properties, helps feed it to upstack suppliers such as Databricks and Snowflake, and also provides data governance facilities. Alation was founded in 2012 and has pulled in $340 million in funding. HPE contributed to its latest and largest round of $123 million last year.
Alation CTO Junaid Saiyed said in a statement: “A data-driven organization can quickly address strategic questions. However, as data volumes grow, locating, understanding, and trusting the data becomes increasingly challenging. This challenge becomes more pronounced when businesses invest in data initiatives like generative AI.”
“Such projects demand extensive data stores to operate as intended. … With ALLIE AI integrated into our data intelligence platform, data teams can expedite the discovery of relevant data, gain insights into the lineage of their AI models, and effectively manage business outcomes on a larger scale.”
ALLIE AI builds upon Alation’s machine learning (ML) capabilities so customers can use Aladdin more effectively, saving time and scaling data programs faster, and advance AI initiatives. Its intelligent curation capabilities enable customers to accelerate the population of their data catalog by automatically documenting new data assets and suggesting appropriate data stewards. ALLIE AI intelligent search and SQL auto-generation enable analysts to find the data they need without needing specialist data analyst skills or knowing the names of the underlying datasets or how to write SQL.
Jonathan Bruce, Alation VP of Product Management, said in a statement: “Alation Analytics Cloud shows customers their data in a way that hasn’t been accessible before – targeted at data analysts and stewards who deliver data catalog adoption and support usage analytics at their organizations.”
Alation says its Analytics Cloud enables customers to:
- Measure their data culture maturity in terms of data leadership, data search and discovery, data literacy, and data governance
- Score data initiatives across metrics such as total assets curated, total active users, and more
- Build a visual map of data consumption: see the effectiveness of individual data products by tracking usage with reports showing which queries are being run by which users against which data stores – plus details on the total execution time of database queries highlighting areas for optimization.
This is large enterprise-class stuff. The Data Management Association (DAMA) is a global community of data management professionals organised around local chapters, such as in New England or the UK. There is a DAMA data maturity model which has 120 questions and can take hours to complete. Alation’s data maturity assessment is shorter and quicker to run but supports the notions of data culture and data maturity.
One aspect of all this is that it provides numerical ratings of qualitative activities and enables numbers-led managers to measure and monitor progress. Alation says its Analytics Cloud provides a framework to articulate the business value of management data initiatives, with customers able to check out the ROI of data initiatives.
It says: “Query Log Ingestion technology enables leaders to understand which data sources are most frequently used and which teams are running which queries. This enables data leaders to map data consumption across their entire enterprise.”
“These insights can then be used to measure the effectiveness of different data programs and, in turn, assess the maturity of an organization’s data culture.”
Maxine Geltmeier, Data Governance manager at First United Bank & Trust, is quoted in Alation’s announcement: “Understanding and illustrating value is paramount. We need to know our data maturity level and which data programs align with key organizational priorities and drive business value. We’re excited to have access to a tool that helps mature and evolve our data culture and will serve as a mechanism to prove a correlation between data initiatives and business performance. Ultimately, this empowers us to act as responsible custodians of the data we’ve been entrusted with.”
This is all a long way up from the storage technology stack’s foundation bits, bytes, disks and SSDs, but very real for large enterprise and organizations.
Alation Analytics Cloud is available today and you can find out more here. The company has a downloadable white paper, The Alation Data Culture Maturity Model: The Path to Data Excellence” which you can access here. ALLIE AI is in public preview and is expected to be generally available in H1 2024. To learn more about ALLIE AI, click here.
