10 Years Later: Who's the GOAT of Data Catalogs?

Founded on 12/12/12, Alation celebrated its 10th year in business this week. Among all the internal celebrations, I wanted to take this moment to reflect on our journey so far and ask a thought-provoking question: who is the GOAT of data catalogs?

What Is a GOAT?

If you follow professional sports, you’re likely familiar with GOATs. For those that are unaware, this acronym stands for the “Greatest Of All Time.”

While often a heavily debated topic, most would agree that just like every story needs a hero, every pursuit needs a GOAT. Common debates often end with the consensus agreeing on the following GOATs:

• Michael Jordan for basketball

• Muhammad Ali for boxing

• Serena Williams for tennis

• Wayne Gretzky for hockey

• Lionel Messi for soccer

• Simone Biles for gymnastics

• And so on

While each of sport existed long before the GOAT players came along, it was these specific players that revolutionized the game and took it to new heights. They broke records, earned scores of accolades, and won over millions of young players and fervent fans who aspire to emulate their success (or at least bask in its glow).

As I reflected on this topic, it occurred to me that software categories should be no different. Like sports, vendors enjoy healthy competition and often find themselves in highly contested markets with several viable opponents, both big and small.

How Do You Determine the GOAT for a Software Category?

But how do you determine the GOAT for a software category? Well, just like in sports, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to leave it to the individual players to decide. These select athletes are determined by what the “market” is saying – this includes fans, analysts, and the press. So not unlike sports, we would then want to look to the market signals – customer reviews, analyst accolades, partner awards, and more – in order to crown a category king.

As Alation celebrates its 10th anniversary this week, I thought it would be as good a time as any to recap what the market has said about us over the past decade.

Here’s a timeline view of what the market has said about Alation since our founding:

Timeline: 10 Years of Alation

2012

• December 2012: Alation forms and goes to work creating the first enterprise data catalog. Later, in its inaugural report on data catalogs, Forrester Research recognizes that “Alation started the MLDC trend.”

2015

• January 2015: Alation acquires its first customer

• March 2015: Alation emerges from stealth mode to launch the first official data catalog to empower people in enterprises to easily find, understand, govern and use data for informed decision making that supports the business.

2016

• April 2016: Tesco Group becomes first customer outside North America

• May 2016: Alation named a Gartner Cool Vendor in their Data Integration and Data Quality, 2016 report

2017

• January 2017: MercadoLibre signs on as the first LATAM customer

• June 2017: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its inaugural Data Catalog End-User Market Study

• June 2017: Yahoo Japan Corp. becomes the first customer in APAC

• August 2017: Alation debuts as a leader in the Gartner MQ for Metadata Management Solutions

2018

• June 2018: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its Data Catalog End-User Market Study for the 2nd time

• August 2018: Constellation Research adds Alation to its Constellation Shortlist for Data Cataloging in Q3 2018 for third consecutive time

• August 2018: Gartner names Alation a 2X Leader in the MQ for Metadata Management Solutions

2019

• May 2019: Inc Magazine names Alation a Best Workplace of 2019

• June 2019: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its Data Catalog End-User Market Study for the 3rd time

• July 2019: Alation hits 100 customers

• August 2019: Constellation Research adds Alation to its Constellation Shortlist for Data Cataloging in Q3 2018 for fourth time

• October 2019: Gartner names Alation a 3X Leader to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions

2020

• March, 2020: Gartner names Alation a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Metadata Management Solutions

• June 2020: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its Data Catalog End-User Market Study for the 4th time

• July 2020: IDC names Alation a leader in its IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Data Catalog Software 2020 Vendor Assessment

• August 2020: Constellation Research names Alation to its Constellation Shortlist for Metadata Management, Data Cataloging & Data Governance in Q3 2020 and Alation customer Cisco wins the Constellation SuperNova Award for Use of Alation for Data Governance

• October 2020: Forrester Research names Alation a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Machine Learning Data Catalogs, Q4, 2020

• November 2020: Gartner names Alation a 4X Leader in the MQ for Metadata Management Solutions

2021

• May 2021: Inc Magazine names Alation a Best Workplace of 2021

• June 2021: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its Data Catalog End-User Market Study for the 5th time

• June 2021: Snowflake names Alation its Data Governance Partner of the Year

• June 2021: Constellation Research recognizes customer Nina Marila, Head of Data Science at Finnair, on its 2022 Business Transformation 150, an elite list of executives leading digital transformation projects around the world

• June 2021: KuppingerCole names Alation a leader in all categories in its inaugural Data Catalogs and Metadata Management Compass.

• June 2021: GigaOm names Alation an innovative leader in the inaugural GigaOm Radar Report for Data Catalogs.

• July 2021: Forrester Research names Alation a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Data Governance Solutions, Q3 2021 report

• August 2021: Constellation Research names Alation to its Constellation Shortlist for Metadata Management, Data Cataloging & Data Governance for second consecutive year

• September 2021: BARC (Business Application Research Center) awards Alation two top rankings and five leading positions in The Data Management Survey 22

2022

• February 2022: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation a winner of its 2021 Technology Innovation Awards

• May 2022: Inc Magazine names Alation a Great Place to Work for third time

• June 2022: Snowlake names Alation its 2X “Data Governance Partner of the Year”

• June 2022: Dresner Advisory Services names Alation the #1 data catalog in its Data Catalog End-User Market Study for the 6th year in a row

• July 2022: Alation achieves 400 active customers

• August 2022: IDC names Alation a Data Catalog Leader in its 2022 IDC MarketScape Vendor Assessment

• September 2022: BARC names Alation a Market Leader in the inaugural BARC Score Data Intelligence Platforms Report

• September 2022: Alation achieves “Centaur” status with $100M+ in ARR, a milestone achieved by just 0.6% of private SaaS companies

Is Alation the GOAT of Data Catalogs?

Is Alation the GOAT of data catalogs? Of data governance? Of the data intelligence market as a whole? All we can do is present the facts, and like any other GOAT discussion, it’s ultimately the market that will decide.

But it’s worth pointing out that Alation created the data catalog product category years before this market took off. Today, we lead the market’s evolution as we further develop the data catalog into a data intelligence platform: one place to find, understand, govern, use, and collaborate around data with total confidence and trust. And in our 10 years of collecting insights and obsessing over delivering value to customers, we’ve realized that for a data intelligence platform to be successful it must fulfill two criteria. It must 1) connect to everything and 2) be engaged and adopted by everyone.

What do we mean by everything? That’s your full suite of BI tools, databases and data sources, cloud data warehouses, connectors, and other beloved tools in the modern data stack. To empower our partners to develop on the Alation platform, we’ve launched programs like the Open Data Quality Initiative, which welcomes data quality partners to innovate on our Open Connector Framework, and guides them on how to best build customized solutions to address our joint customers’ diverse needs.

What do we mean by everyone? We mean the usual suspects, of course: data scientists & engineers, IT leaders, analysts, CIOs, and CDOs… But we also mean the people who have been excluded from critical access to data for too long: business users within all parts of the enterprise, from finance and marketing to operations and HR. As more organizations seek to use data as a strategic asset, more people will need to be included to realize the promise of a data culture.

Today, more than 25% of the Fortune 100 use Alation to do just that. Tomorrow, we seek to expand our vision and values to.

Choices abound. There are legacy players, new entrants, and scrappy startups. But when it comes time for your business to pick a data catalog, ask yourself this: do I want to partner with a “good enough” catalog? Or do I go with the GOAT?

Is Alation really the data catalog GOAT? Try a demo and decide for yourself.