Category: Alation

Alation Comes Out Of Stealth With Platform Designed To Enhance Access To Data Within An Organization

Alation today came out of stealth to announce a software platform that enables knowledge workers within enterprises to more effectively locate, understand and use data stored within their data infrastructures. Alation integrates knowledge of an organization’s data by using a combination of machine learning technology in conjunction with human curation processes to help organizations derive the maximum value from their data repository. The company’s technology platform crawls an organization’s databases to create the analogue of a Google PageRank for data elements that reflect how often the data has been used, who has used it, who originated the data and the degree to which it has been validated within the organization. Alation’s platform also features collaborative analytics that allow analysts to take advantage of the crowdsourced contributions of other analysts and data scientists. The collaborative analytics functionality enables users to take advantage of real-time annotations to data elements from other users within the organization that shed light on its significance, uses, reception and relationship to other data points and sets.

Other solutions offered by Alation include Data Warehouse Optimization, Data Governance frameworks and Data Search and Discovery that runs across distributed datasets by using natural language searches. Today’s announcement builds on Alation’s $9M Series A funding raise announcement in March. Alation already claims an impressive roster of customers that include eBay, MarketShare, Inflection and Invoice2Go. Unlike the bevy of Big Data analytics platforms that focus on analytic queries on streaming or distributed datasets, Alation’s innovation consists in its commitment to simplifying, streamlining and enriching access to data within an enterprise. By focusing on knowledge about data, Alation promises to accelerate both the quality of analytic deliverables as well as the cycle time required to produce data-driven insights by rendering data easier to find and contextualize. Expect to hear more about Alation’s ability to leverage machine learning technology to enhance the ability of analysts to locate data of interest as its platform consolidates on its early market traction and focuses the valences of its product development in collaboration with customer feedback.

Alation Raises $9M In Series A Funding For Stealth Solution To Enhance Big Data Accessibility

Alation today announces the finalization of $9M in Series A funding led by Costanoa Venture Capital and Data Collective Venture Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Bloomberg Beta and General Catalyst Partners. The funding will be used both for product development and the expansion of Alation’s sales and marketing operations. Still in stealth mode, Alation intends to enhance the ability of organizations to access and retrieve data. Based on the premise that organizations continue to struggle with respect to locating data housed within their own infrastructures, Alation intends to improve data accessibility as well as to help customers more effectively understand the quality and significance of their data. Alation CEO Satyen Sangani remarked on Alation’s value proposition as follows:

Organizations still struggle with quickly finding, understanding and using the right data. Data-driven enterprises have voracious appetites for information and continue to make massive investments in data management platforms like Hadoop and business intelligence software like Tableau. While these technologies help with computation, storage, and visualization, ironically they make it harder to navigate the ocean of data. Alation helps people get to key insights faster.

Although business intelligence platforms such as Tableau facilitate data visualization and analysis, Sangani notes, organizations continue to wrestle with the problem of maneuvering within their “ocean of data” and finding the right data for analysis. Led by a team of founders with prior experience at Oracle, Google and Apple, Alation is gearing up for a general availability release of its platform in mid-2015. As told to Cloud Computing Today by CEO Satyen Sangani, the company’s solution focuses on structured and semi-structured data and claims several large, data-driven companies within its roster of customers. Expect more details regarding Alation to emerge within the upcoming months as it comes out of stealth and takes the wraps off its platform for managing big data complexity and increasing data accessibility more generally.