Teradata and Alation Partner to Build Trust in Self-Service Analytics

SAN DIEGO AND REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Jan. 27, 2016 – Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the big data analytics and marketing applications company, today announced a strategic partnership with Alation, Inc., the data catalog company, to deliver a collaborative data catalog that brings trust in data to self-service analytics. It has become increasingly challenging for organizations to make the right data available for self-service analytics. Trade-offs between the speed, accuracy and scale of data delivery often result in analysis that is at best untrustworthy and at worst inaccurate.

Teradata has partnered with Alation, Inc. to re-sell the Alation Data Catalog to Teradata customers and prospects struggling to achieve trust in data – in those data environments that have grown more complex with big data. The exponential growth of data by volume and type is making it necessary to provide referential resources for collaboration among enterprise users. In addition, data platforms and utilities are multiplying, from data warehouses to data lakes and other repositories – further complicating the use of data throughout an organization.

Data catalogs help build trust by connecting the dots between data, systems and people, gathering both technical information and organizational knowledge about internal data in a single, accessible place.

Teradata, in close collaboration with Mohanbir Sawhney of Northwestern University, has described the catalog trend as meeting the need for a Collaborative Ideation Platform in the Sentient Enterprise, referring to a framework to accelerate business users’ productivity and establish a useful encyclopedia of the company’s analytics. Teradata’s choice of Alation as the ideal partner for data cataloging and collaboration tools reflects strong confidence in the business value of Alation’s approach to self-service analytics.

Alation is the first software company to improve the productivity of business users and IT professionals through an automated and collaborative data catalog. Alation uses observations of human and data interactions across business intelligence, database and Hadoop systems in conjunction with expert curation to populate an enterprise data catalog. The catalog is used by business users as a point of reference for the knowledge about data in an organization and also becomes the foundation for automated recommendations for self-service use of data. Just as online consumer catalogs deliver value through product recommendations based on prior consumer behavior, Alation’s catalog delivers recommendations based on user experience and analyst behavior. Surfacing existing reports and analysis to data consumers encourages re-use of analytics, connects peers in collaborative conversations, and stops organizations from reinventing the same analysis again and again across different data platforms.

“Organizations are becoming overwhelmed with data to the point where they can’t see the forest through the trees. The partnership of Alation and Teradata is meant to address this by combining machine learning, collaboration, and crowdsourcing to build smart catalogs that help point business end users to the right queries and the right data,” said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst – Information Management, Ovum. Understanding the origin, accuracy and business context of data that is available for analysis is a critical step prior to data preparation in the new world of distributed big data. Collaborative tools like Alation are even more critical when using multiple databases and Hadoop systems in the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™

Alation is currently in use at several large Teradata customer organizations. For example, eBay was recently honored at Teradata PARTNERS Conference and Expo with a Teradata EPIC Award for its self-service analytics with Alation.

The Teradata and Alation partnership includes joint engineering, joint sales engagement and joint marketing. Through the partnership, Teradata will resell Alation Enterprise globally. Teradata customers will be able to obtain licenses for Alation software under their existing Teradata agreement.

“The rise of self-service analytics and the sheer volume and variety of data in use is driving a natural redefinition of data management,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and cofounder, Alation. “You can’t manage data without managing the knowledge of how to use the data. Alation and Teradata share many large customers that are at the forefront of data collaboration, with a strong demand from many others. Teradata is the bedrock of analytics in the Global 2000, and its customer loyalty and the strength of its customer relationships are unmatched. This is an important partnership for introducing Alation to more customers and for driving new innovation in the field of big data insights.”

“In talking to hundreds of our customers, I’ve spent my career in awe of how data can change companies and transform cultures. At Teradata, we believe that every enterprise can become a Sentient Enterprise – one that quickly observes, adapts and learns. With the enormous scale of databases and data lakes, employees can no longer rely on ‘who you know.’ Crowdsourcing knowledge about your analytic systems is the only way to retain and share knowledge in complex data ecosystems,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, president of Teradata Labs. “Users need to be able to see what others have done with similar data or projects. New hires need to rapidly tap that corporate knowledge. By coupling the knowledge of crowds with the wisdom of experts, we can scale the decision making and change the way enterprises behave – transforming them from slow, monolithic companies to agile, sentient organizations. Alation is a critical part of our customers achieving this end state.”

Relevant News Links

• See Oliver Ratzesberger’s new blog on the Teradata-Alation partnership and the Sentient Enterprise

• Read Satyen Sangani’s new blog on the Alation-Teradata partnership

• Read Ovum analyst Tony Baer’s perspective report on Alation

• To view the new Forrester WAVE report naming Teradata a leader in enterprise data warehousing for big data analytics, visit the Teradata microsite.