Alation Announces Data Intelligence Platform with the Broadest and Deepest Connectivity in the Market

Redwood City, Calif. – February 18, 2021 – Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced the release and general availability of Alation 2021.1, strengthening the company’s industry-leading data intelligence platform. The newest release extends connector and query coverage to virtually any data source, expedites relevant search & discovery through data domains, and features new data governance capabilities.

Alation 2021.1 supports data-driven enterprises by providing a platform that includes connectors to the most comprehensive range of applications and data sources available on the market – beyond Business Intelligence (BI) and filesystems – to applications such as ServiceNow and Salesforce, among others. The platform’s new, federated authentication enables users to query cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Snowflake, conveniently and securely using single sign-on. By snapping into a variety of applications and data sources, Alation serves as a single place to find, understand, and trust data across an organization.

Alation 2021.1 also includes:

• Accelerated time to insight. A new Open Connect Framework software development kit (SDK) enables third parties, including customers and partners, to build connectors to niche RDBMS and BI data sources. Through the containerization, upgrades to connectors can now be managed without disruption to the data catalog. Now, users can query new types of data sources such as NoSQL and application sources, directly through Alation’s intelligent SQL editor, Compose, decreasing the time it takes to discover and generate insights from data.

• Increased search relevancy. Data domains increase search relevancy by allowing users to narrow their searches based on how data is grouped logically by the organization, such as business unit or geography. The platform’s upgraded user provisioning provides immediate access to role-specific experiences with a one-time mapping of enterprise directory groups and expedites onboarding.

• New data governance capabilities. New impact analysis reports provide an immediate view into the downstream impact of data changes, and help uncover the root cause of issues based on the quality or trustworthiness of upstream data sources. A new profiling integration with Compose also allows users to identify and correct data quality issues as data is consumed.

“We have more than 90 data sources in Alation owned by over 30 different teams at Genius Sports. The enhancements to Alation 2021.1 have helped drive adoption of the platform across these various groups, making it easier for users to uncover information about our data using Alation,” said Steve Perry, Director of Data and Analytics, Genius Sports. “With the addition of data domains, Alation will allow our users to understand the relationships between data like never before. This in turn will help us be more efficient when working with data, and ultimately produce more value from it.”

“Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 firms have invested in a myriad of best-of-breed technologies, data sources, systems, and tools. They need the freedom to deeply connect to and integrate these investments without being dependent on a particular vendor,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder, Alation. “By transforming the catalog into an open platform for data intelligence, our customers can deploy and realize benefits in the short term and have a robust, extensible architecture they can build on top of in the long term.”

Alation 2021.1 drives adoption of the platform across the enterprise by meeting the growing requirements of business users, data analysts, and data engineers. The release also includes Search API that allows for the simple integration of Alation Search with third party tools. Updates to Enhanced Analytics allow users to analyze and filter search terms by date range and user group.

Learn more about Alation 2021.1

• Read our blog interview Alation 2021.1: Architecting a Platform with Junaid Saiyed Senior VP of Engineering at Alation

• Read our blog Alation 2021.1: Getting users to the data they need, faster