Original press release published here.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. –October 11, 2023 – Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced Alation Analytics Cloud¹, a unified reporting platform. Analytics Cloud provides a visual map of an organization’s data usage and harnesses these insights to score its data initiatives and the overall maturity of its data culture.
Given the vast opportunities associated with data, analytics, and AI, organizations can no longer afford uncoordinated data efforts without a clear link to value. However, the majority of CDOs fail to value and price the business outcomes created by data and analytics, according to Harvard Business Review. Organizations need a framework to benchmark and advance data management capabilities as they become critical strategic initiatives. Yet, organizations lack the tools to measure data initiatives' value and impact on the business. Additionally, different teams have different ways of analyzing data and need the ability to assess critical usage statistics to consistently understand and grow their data culture.
Analytics Cloud provides a framework to articulate the business value of their data initiatives. Alation’s Query Log Ingestion technology enables leaders to understand which data sources are most frequently used and which teams are running which queries. This enables data leaders to map data consumption across their entire enterprise. These insights can then be used to measure the effectiveness of different data programs and, in turn, assess the maturity of an organization’s data culture. These insights can also be used to optimize queries and rationalize data sources, for example, by accelerating the migration of frequently used datasets or the retirement of data sources that are no longer actively used to reduce cost.
“Data initiatives, like any strategic objective across the business, must deliver tangible ROI to demonstrate value and justify ongoing support and resources,” said Maxine Geltmeier, Data Governance Manager at First United Bank & Trust. “Understanding and illustrating value is paramount. We need to know our data maturity level and which data programs align with key organizational priorities and drive business value. We’re excited to have access to a tool that helps mature and evolve our data culture and will serve as a mechanism to prove a correlation between data initiatives and business performance. Ultimately, this empowers us to act as responsible custodians of the data we’ve been entrusted with.”
“Organizations are investing in data as a key initiative, which means data leaders need to illustrate value in the same manner as their business leader counterparts,” said Jonathan Bruce, Vice President of Product Management at Alation. “Analytics Cloud shows customers their data in a way that hasn’t been accessible before – targeted at data analysts and stewards who deliver data catalog adoption and support usage analytics at their organizations. Alation brings the value of data intelligence to life. Now, with Analytics Cloud, they have the methodology to track, understand, and report on the value it brings the business, helping to evaluate data proficiency and establish a data-informed baseline to define improvement plans.”
Analytics Cloud enables organizations to:
• Measure their data culture maturity: Organizations can measure data culture maturity through four crucial components: data leadership, data search and discovery, data literacy, and data governance.
• Score their data programs: Data leaders can measure the progress of data initiatives across metrics such as total assets curated, total active users, and many more.
• Map data consumption: Business and data leaders can see the effectiveness of individual data products by tracking actual usage. Reports provide insights on which queries are being run by which users against which data stores. The reports also provide details on the total execution time of database queries highlighting areas for optimization.
¹Alation Analytics Cloud is currently in pilot, and is expected to be generally available in 2024
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