Alation Named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions for the Third Time

REDWOOD CITY, Calif – October 22, 2019 – Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced that for the third year running it was recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions, and this year improved its position on the completeness of vision axis compared to the previous year. According to the report, “Leaders are frontrunners with offerings that support the full range of metadata management capabilities. They exhibit a clear understanding of, and vision for, where the market is headed, and are good at meeting customers’ requirements for a variety of use cases. They support both business and technical metadata scenarios, with the help of strategic partnerships to optimize delivery of their solutions. They establish market trends by providing new functional capabilities and by identifying new types of business problem to which they can bring significant value. Leaders have an established and/or fast-growing market presence and a multinational presence.”

Alation delivers a comprehensive data catalog that meets the key criteria for metadata management. Gartner noted four examples of metadata use cases: data governance, risk and compliance, data analysis and data value. Alation believes that each use case is critical to building a healthy data culture and navigating enterprise digital transformations.

Building a data culture requires a strong metadata management foundation and applications that package active metadata with easy-to-use interfaces for self-service analytics users. The Alation Data Catalog delivers both, making metadata relevant to data specialists and data consumers by building on the key features of metadata management, like metadata repositories and business glossaries. Alation has been recognized for its leading data-cataloging capabilities by experts since 2015.

Data catalogs have become a must-have to drive value from enterprise metadata. According to a complementary report published by Gartner in September called Augmented Data Catalogs: Now an Enterprise Must-Have for Data and Analytics Leaders, “Data and analytics leaders evaluating data catalogs as part of their data management and analytics strategy must leverage an ML-augmented data catalog as a first step in metadata management to simplify and in some cases, automate the process of discovering, inventorying, profiling, tagging and creating semantic relationships between distributed and siloed data assets, which are becoming impossible to catalog manually.”

Alation’s unique approach to deriving proactive data recommendations from metadata using Behavior I/O differentiates Alation from both data cataloging and metadata management competitors. Users benefit from machine learning-driven recommendations, like proactive data and query recommendations with SmartSuggest and data governance policy reminders with TrustCheck. Enterprises adopting Alation benefit from a solution that promotes the collaboration, accuracy and trust in data required to build a data culture. The Alation Data Catalog is in production with over 130 enterprises including American Family Insurance, Pfizer and Scout24.

“As a data-driven organization we need accurate data to drive business decisions. Today, business users need data at their disposal so they can provide reports and conduct analysis without relying on IT,” said Patrick Brickson, Director of Enterprise Data Systems, Digi-Key Electronics. “The Alation Data Catalog empowers business analysts to search and find data elements that they previously didn’t know existed and make better decisions more quickly, without relying on IT.”

“I am excited to see this report acknowledge our approach and that today’s data-driven organizations require agile metadata management systems that use machine learning to drive business outcomes. These attributes are attracting new customers while delivering increased productivity and loyalty among existing customers such as Exelon, Finnair and Munich Re.”