Alation Deepens Integration with Snowflake to Improve Data Quality and Deliver AI-Ready Data

Redwood City, Calif. – June 4, 2024 – Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced at Snowflake’s annual user conference, Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024, a deepened integration with Snowflake Horizon to increase data quality and deliver AI-ready data for organizations. Alation’s Open Data Quality Framework, now supports integration with Snowflake Horizon, enabling organizations to proactively detect and address data quality issues before they impact business or data operations, facilitating improved governance, faster and more accurate AI model development, and trusted decision-making across the enterprise.

According to Forrester, the business use for generative AI (GenAI) is ubiquitous, with 70% of enterprises already using GenAI and an additional 20% exploring its adoption¹. However, several challenges can disrupt the process, with data quality being the primary obstacle to adoption. GenAI processes data at unprecedented speed, scale, and complexity, placing strain on data governance capabilities. This gap in AI readiness incurs significant costs, diminishing efficiency and productivity due to wasted resources and missed opportunities. Additionally, organizations face challenges around fragmented, legacy data platforms combined with insufficient quality checks, hampering AI initiatives for the future while exposing firms to risks such as legal penalties and financial losses in the present.

 Alation and Snowflake have deepened their partnership to tackle these challenges head-on, providing a comprehensive solution that integrates data quality functions, policies, and health to modernize legacy data infrastructure, accelerate AI initiatives, and mitigate risks. Leveraging Alation and Snowflake, organizations gain a unified and trusted view of data quality across their entire data landscape, a foundational step crucial for building reliable AI models. Alation enhances AI model development through simplified access and an open, extensible approach to key data quality metrics, including freshness, accuracy, uniqueness, and completeness. Alation ensures precise and unbiased results by empowering everyone to find, understand, and use trusted data while governing both models and datasets within Snowflake’s extensive AI Data Cloud.

“Data trust is now critical in every business sector as teams face heightened scrutiny over data quality and its impact on AI applications and analytics," said Sujay Mimani, IT Architecture Senior Manager at AMD. "Alation's straightforward search and discovery capabilities, federated governance, and the ease to integrate Data Quality platforms enable users to independently access and trust data, helping ensure reliable, compliant, and suitable information. This reassures data, AI/ML teams, and decision-makers of the data’s integrity, making data a valuable asset for confident, strategic decision-making."

“Trust in data has become essential across all aspects of business, as data teams face challenges in ensuring data quality amid growing scrutiny from developers and decision-makers concerned about the downstream effects of analytics and AI applications,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “The Alation Data Intelligence Platform makes information easily searchable and provides vital contextual information that transforms data into a valuable, actionable asset for strategic decisions.”

“We are revolutionizing data quality and the approach to AI readiness through our strengthened integration with Snowflake,” said David Chao, CMO and Head of Technology Alliances at Alation. “Poor data quality is a major obstacle in data and GenAI initiatives. With Alation and Snowflake, organizations can confidently leverage their data for crucial decisions and AI strategies, promoting a data-driven culture throughout their data estate.”

Alation improves data quality and delivers AI-ready data for enterprises with:

• Proactive Data Quality Monitoring: Curate and act upon data quality metrics from Snowflake directly in the Alation Data Intelligence Platform. Integrate customized data metric functions (DMFs) from Snowflake into Alation so that all users – including AI/ML engineers – benefit from robust, fully integrated data health and data quality monitoring and controls. An API-based Data Health tab in Alation further enhances visibility by displaying data quality rules across the organization and bolstering confidence and trust in AI-driven initiatives.

• Streamlined Data Discovery: Alation’s intelligent data catalog facilitates quick and efficient data access across Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, eliminating manual searches or complex queries for trusted data to use in AI model development or self-service analytics.

• Unified Data Governance: Users can easily catalog, classify, and manage data while enabling policies and controls (dynamic data masking) within the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and across an organization’s entire data landscape, ensuring adherence to internal and external regulatory standards and ethical AI practices.

• Automated Compliance Monitoring: Alation’s comprehensive data lineage capabilities track data movement across the Snowflake ecosystem and beyond. This enables organizations to automate compliance monitoring with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, thereby mitigating data breach risks and providing data provenance for easy auditability for AI/ML models.

Alation at Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2024

• Visit booth #1330 and discover how Alation accelerates data-driven decision-making and delivers AI-ready data.

• Attend “Intelligent Cloud Migration and Optimization with Alation,” presented by Jim Haas, Senior Director, Chief Data Architect at Fiserv, and Allen Goldschmidt, Director of Data Management at Fiserv, in a breakout session on how to leverage Alation to find, understand, and govern data to reap maximum benefits from the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

• Learn how to apply data governance within Snowflake, utilizing the powerful capabilities of Snowflake Horizon, and discover how to empower users to find, understand, and trust their data. This Hands-On Lab will be led by Ravi Kumar, Data Governance Specialist PSE at Snowflake, along with Michael Meyer, Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager at Alation, and Nick Jewell, Sr. Principal Product Marketing Manager at Alation.

Learn how to maximize your Snowflake AI Data Cloud’s potential and ensure AI readiness with Alation, and read Snowflake and Alation Partner to Drive Quality, AI-Ready Data to learn how the joint solution works. 

 ^{1. Forrester blog: Data Quality Is Now The Primary Factor Limiting GenAI Adoption, by Brett Kahnke and Michele Goetz, February 26, 2024}