Alation and Fivetran Partner to Bring Greater Visibility to the Modern Data Stack

Alation is pleased to launch a new strategic partnership with Fivetran, the leader in modern data integration. This new partnership will unify governed, quality data into a single view, granting all stakeholders total visibility into pipelines and providing them with a superior ability to make data-driven decisions.

For people to understand and trust data, they need to see it in context. Increasingly, data pipelines form that context, encompassing data’s origin and many transformations as it’s processed and parsed, from source to signal. Yet a growing population needs access to manage such pipelines — and the data they deliver — with confidence and clarity. This partnership will support these decision-makers by providing consistent and trustworthy data.

Data pipelines are a critical part of the modern data stack. They speed access to data and make more data available to everyone. Today, data pipelines are critical for real-time analytics and have become essential tools for leaders needing to make faster, data-driven decisions.

The rapid rise of data pipelines underscores an oft-overlooked reality: in an enterprise, massive amounts of data move each day. Increasingly, leaders need visibility into this movement (and the pipelines that support it) for a variety of reasons.

Overseeing data quality and ensuring proper usage represent two core reasons. Data pipelines contain valuable information that can be used to improve data quality and ensure data is used properly. Fivetran’s announced Metadata API unlocks this information and allows it to be loaded into the data catalog, where it can build trust in data and speed pipeline creation with data intelligence.

Data Pipeline Strategy

Fivetran was founded to help organizations quickly and reliably manage and deploy scalable data pipelines. Modern data leaders need to deliver trusted, compliant data to the right people at the right time. A critical part of this mission is ensuring the best data reaches its intended destination.

When you make a critical, data-driven decision to improve customer experience, drive innovation, or streamline operations, you must first know where the data comes from and how you can use it compliantly. Data pipelines give you that background. They describe the source of the data, what data is being accessed, how it’s transformed, and where it’s going. This information is critical for people who need to trust in the data and its reliability. And with this partnership, we’re making this information more accessible and understandable for all users in the data catalog.

Alation and Fivetran

Alation unifies information about your data and delivers data intelligence. As organizations race to become data-driven, more parts of the organization need data intelligence. As our founder Satyan Sangini points out, “the data catalog is the platform for data intelligence.”

With Fivetran’s Metadata API, a valuable set of data is now part of the equation. As data moves around systems, there is a wealth of information that can help everyone in the organization working with data.

“Fivetran and Alation’s capabilities set the stage for an ongoing partnership, bringing data intelligence to data engineering teams that enhance visibility and provide context to data, resulting in making informed decisions with the right data,” said Meera Viswanathan, Sr. Product Manager for Fivetran’s data governance capabilities. “By working with Alation, joint customers can speed up pipeline development and implement easy-to-use and automated governance for data movement. This capability will deliver reliable and flexible data pipelines that provide accurate and trusted data to everyone in an organization.”

Metadata API in action

Fivetran’s Metadata API release unlocks access to pipeline data. By combining this API with Alation’s, data leaders can bring Fivetran data into Alation’s data catalog. This means that Fivetran data can be discovered, annotated, and governed. This also means joint users can:

• See source-to-destination lineage. Now, people can track where data is and where it came from.

• Comprehend data in context, seeing how it has moved between systems. This builds trust and improves data quality.

• Create one place to govern data movement. Data stewards and data consumers can see how governance impacts transformation.

With greater visibility into data movement, joint users can improve data quality. They can link data sources to destinations using lineage visualizations. And they can build new data pipelines faster with Alation’s metadata capabilities. With the catalog, the data from these pipelines can be shared across every team in the organization.

Conclusion

Putting Alation and Fivetran together is a powerful combination. But don’t just take it from me:

“Alation enables data and analytics teams to capture and understand the full breadth of their data, resulting in improved operational efficiencies and delivering more value to customers,” said Raj Gossain, Chief Product Officer at Alation. “The integration with Fivetran enhances these capabilities. Now, users can easily unlock reliable and relevant data while also allowing teams to understand what data is available in the pipeline.”

Fivetran’s Metadata API represents an important step in the data intelligence journey. It helps bring the reliable data in pipelines to everyone working with data and helps drive data intelligence as part of the modern data stack. We’re excited to be part of this journey with Fivetran to enable organizations to become more data-driven.

To learn more about Fivetran & Alation, download this one-pager.