Alation Named a Gartner 2016 Cool Vendor

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – May 19, 2016 – Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced that it has been recognized in the May 12 “Cool Vendors in Data Integration and Data Quality, 2016” report. Alation is one of five vendors recognized in the report, which focuses on how digital businesses force data and analytics leaders to rethink their information infrastructure: instead of just collecting data, new approaches to data integration and data quality are required.

“Data integration and data quality challenges are compounded by the new and different data types (such as Internet of Things [IoT] data) emerging because of the rise of digital businesses; data and analytics leaders now have to factor these challenges into their data management strategies,” said Ehtisham Zaidi, senior research analyst at Gartner, Roxane Edjlali, research director at Gartner, Ted Friedman, research vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Mark A. Beyer, Research Vice President and distinguished analyst at Gartner, Eric Thoo, research director at Gartner, Andrew White, research vice president and distinguished Analyst at Gartner, and Saul Judah, research director at Gartner.

“The escalating complexity and diversity resulting from proliferating big data sources (both internal and external) makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to harness the most relevant information to drive their digital business agendas. Data and analytics leaders should seek opportunities to break down silos by empowering key business roles to combine data from various sources, and build up a centralized catalog of an enterprise’s data assets for automated discovery of metadata and information integration, regardless of data type or location.”

The report evaluates interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services in the data integration market that enable data and analytics leaders to be more competitive. Gartner’s report points out, “One of the most significant problems facing data and analytics leaders is the loss of knowledge on meaning, structure, location and usage of data across the enterprise. This challenge has been driven by increasing levels of complexity, as data in analytical and operational environments continues to sprawl.”

Alation is the first company to improve both the productivity of business users and IT professionals through a modern data catalog that leverages a combination of both automated, machine learning techniques and crowdsourced human input. Observations of human and data interactions across business intelligence, database and Hadoop systems are combined with human curation to populate the Alation Data Catalog as a single point of reference for the knowledge about data in an organization. For companies in a wide variety of industries, the Alation Data Catalog has become the foundation for automated query recommendations to business users, whether business analysts, data analysts or data scientists, for self-service use of data.

“We believe recognition as a ‘Cool Vendor’ is an honor, particularly as the market for data catalogs takes shape,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder of Alation. “While data is everywhere, most business users can’t use it because they either can’t find the data when they need it or don’t understand how to analyze the data properly. Analytics is about generating knowledge, but it’s ironic that we’re so horrible at preserving and disseminating the knowledge of how to analyze data correctly. More than anything, we’re excited that Gartner is leading the way in recognizing new solutions to this age-old problem.”

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