Authored by Ali Wasti, Managing Director and Jeff Chang, Analyst, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder

Originally published on HPE Newsroom here.

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IN THIS ARTICLE

• Organizations are increasingly relying on metadata to better understand their data and the context it provides
• Alation’s self-service platform provides a single repository of available data, reports, and owners across the organization helping enterprises capture, understand, and manage their data assets
• HPE's collaboration with Alation will allow HPE customers to set up data catalogs quickly to further capture, understand, and manage their data

Innovations in data management have enabled organizations to store, analyze, and extract insights to deliver business value in increasingly profound ways as new use cases emerge, mature, and evolve. Concurrently however, data infrastructures and organizations’ abilities to manage their data have also grown in complexity. That has left enterprises continuing to struggle with seemingly basic tasks, such as understanding what data is available and how to locate it, before being able to derive actionable insights from increasingly growing amounts of data.

Enormous amounts of both structured and unstructured data are being generated. IDC’s Global DataSphere¹ research concludes that organizations struggle to manage these complex and varied data assets across different databases, solutions providers, and hosting environments. Data governance – with its goals to ensure data is accurate and of high quality – is difficult to ensure across the entire organization.

Organizations increase their reliance on metadata

Organizations are increasingly relying on metadata to better understand their data and the context it provides. Metadata includes information such as the purpose, who created the data, when the data was created, where the data is stored, how the data is used, and relationships to other data.

To systematically leverage the usefulness of metadata, data catalogs have emerged to better inventory and organize data assets. Gartner defines “data catalog² as a tool used to “maintain an inventory of data assets through the discovery, description, and organization of datasets. The catalog provides context to enable data analysts, data scientists, data stewards, and other data consumers to find and understand a relevant dataset for the purpose of extracting business value.”

HPE: Data catalogs should secure a prime position

At Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), we believe data catalogs, particularly solutions that incorporate machine learning (ML) to streamline data catalog workflows, should secure a prime position among data governance solutions for organizations to operate in both a data-rich and data-driven world. Organizing data in catalogs allows it to be sorted as structured and unstructured; perishable and non-perishable; proprietary and non-proprietary; transactional and used continuously; stored in backup; ingested into systems for analytics and machine learning; reside on-prem and/or across multiple cloud platform providers; and leverage many different types of storage technologies.

HPE’s customers recognize these complexities result in a range of operational, security, and compliance challenges – all further hampered by insufficient resources to address these headwinds. For example, an IDC survey found 30% of data professional’s time are unproductive due to lack of knowledge required to find, prepare, and govern data³.

HPE and Alation: A New Partnership

Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, the venture capital arm of HPE, recently made an investment in software start-up Alation, in order to help customers find, analyze, and protect their data — no matter where it lives. Alation helps organizations achieve their data governance goals with its self-service, continuously updated platform that provides a single repository of available data, reports, and owners across the organization for use by data scientists, business analysts engineers, compliance offers, and data architects.

Alation’s differentiated user behavior approach, embedded into its data intelligence solution, leverages ML to continuously assess how data and metadata are being used within an organization to maximize value to users – whether that is simplifying the search and discovery process or surfacing analytical insight through recommendations and data context.

"Alation and HPE are working on an integration allowing customers to setup data catalogs quickly"

One of the benefits of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder is that it creates connections between HPE and portfolio companies for collaboration and co-development. For example, Alation and the Cloud Data Services team within HPE’s Storage business are currently working on an integration with Alation’s leading data intelligence solution. This collaboration will allow HPE customers to set up data catalogs quickly, with just a few clicks, using a wide variety of pre-built connectors to popular data sources for a comprehensive view of data assets – enabling customers to further capture, understand, and manage their data with ease and efficiency.

"Hewlett Packard Pathfinder creates connections between HPE and portfolio companies for collaboration"

Hewlett Packard Pathfinder is excited to partner with the Alation team as the company continues to build a category-leading platform. In addition, we look forward to the continued collaboration between Alation and HPE to enable customers to further unlock value from their data to achieve their business goals.

¹IDC Global DataSphere

²Gartner research titled “Data Catalogs Are the New Black in Data Management and Analytics” dated December 2017

³An IDC InfoBrief, Commissioned by Alteryx titled “The State of Data Discovery and Cataloging” dated January 2018