The Customers Have Spoken: Alation Wins Three New TrustRadius Awards

At Alation, we measure success through customer impact. So when our customers speak, we listen. That’s why we’re very excited to share that our customers have helped us win three new TrustRadius awards: Best Relationship, Best Feature Set, and Best Value for the Price. These awards follow our TrustRadius Top Rated customer recognition in Data Catalog, Data Collaboration, Data Governance, and Metadata Management in May 2023. 

Let’s explore why our customers voted Alation as having the best feature set, providing the most value for the price, and why they love their relationship with Alation. 

Best Relationship

Our customers tell us they love working with Alation. Our customer satisfaction score (CSAT) has exceeded 98% over the past four quarters and is improving monthly. “In 18 years at CCHMC, I’ve never seen a vendor be so supportive, responsive, engaged, and invested in our success,” says a leader from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. 

Best-in-class support

Alation provides best-in-class support and services to give our customers a timely and effective resolution to each problem. Our global support engineers are strategically located worldwide to deliver help fast, on our customers’ schedule. 

The customer experience team has implemented the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) methodology. Support engineers capture technical insights from every customer interaction and convert them into knowledge articles. They’ve now written over 3,000 articles that customers can quickly access through the Alation platform. 

“The support team is the best we could ask for. They go above and beyond for us to feel comfortable and confident while using Alation. They are truly awesome!”

- Analyst in Information Technology, Financial Services Company

Starting off right with Right Start 

Our Right Start services differentiate Alation from companies that hand over software code and leave customers to “plug and play” on their own. Right Start is a full life cycle engagement where Alation’s consultants lead our customers through all implementation and rollout phases from inception to go-live, focusing on rapid time-to-value. 

Right Start enables our customers to:

• Lay a strong foundation for initial rollout

• Establish robust catalog stewardship processes

• Drive catalog adoption and success

Upon completion, our customers have a fully trained team, a growing community of users, and a clear plan for further expansion and adoption.

“From the Right Start Program to the Customer Success team to technical support, Alation has it all covered. They respond quickly and expertly to answer my questions and fix my problems.” 

- Allen Goldschmidt, Director of Data Management, Fiserv

Ongoing connections and learning opportunities

Alation’s relationship with our customers doesn’t end with Right Start. We offer ongoing networking through our Community, self-service technical support through the Alation Help Center, and training through the Alation Community and Alation University. 

Customers connect with each other and with Alation experts in the Alation Community. 94% of our customers have at least one representative in the community, and 45% of members log in at least once a week. The Community offers ongoing access to events, Alation experts, discussion boards, developer documents, and quarterly updates on our product roadmap. Community members also tell us that it helps them expand their professional network.

“The Alation Community is very helpful — extraordinarily helpful — one of the main reasons we purchased the [Alation] tool is because of the Community.”

- An Alation customer and Community member

Customers access the Community and other resources through the Alation Help Center (AHC). The AHC empowers users to easily and quickly self-serve the information they need from a broad set of Alation resources. It provides a unified search across multiple systems and knowledge resources so that users can find and retrieve product documentation, training materials, adoption resources, Community content, and more, all from a single portal.

“At my old job, we used a competitor’s product. The Alation Help Center experience is far beyond what any other competitors are offering.”

- Alation customer and Alation Help Center user

Alation University offers certifications, governance programs, badges, and demos to help your teams upgrade their knowledge and boost their own data literacy.

“One of Alation’s real strengths is Alation University’s high-quality, easy-to-approach training materials that are good for both initial user training and for refresher training.”

- Data Manager, US Federal Government Agency

Best Feature Set

Of course, Alation has the key features you would expect from any data catalog: the ability to curate and provide context about data from multiple sources, including on-premise and cloud data sources such as  Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Databricks. But Alation is more than a catalog. Alation is a data intelligence platform.

More than just a data catalog - we are a data intelligence platform

What does that mean? It means that Alation is a people-first platform that enables users to collaborate around well-governed data as a community. It means people have one single source of truth for trusted, governed data. Our cloud transformation customers especially appreciate our Query Log Ingestion (QLI) features. QLI lets you understand your data and who is using it before migrating it to the cloud. 

“When we looked at the features that were available [in Alation], the compatibility with Snowflake and, obviously, the fact that we were existing Alation users and were already getting a lot of value out of it, it was a fairly obvious choice for us to continue with Alation.”

- Peter Langham, Domain Chapter Lead, Engineering, Spark NZ

With our embedded AI copilot, Allie AI, customers enjoy the speed and convenience of automated cataloging, including key governance tasks. In the future, Allie AI will automatically document new data assets and suggest data stewards. 

We are continuously expanding our feature set. Do your business users love their spreadsheets? Alation Connected Sheets allows users to leverage the power of Alation for trusted data right from Excel and Google Sheets. Alation Anywhere extends Alation’s data intelligence capabilities to collaborative tools, including Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Alation loves open standards

Our customers demand connectivity with multiple platforms and solutions. Rather than creating a solution that claims to do everything but doesn’t play well with other applications, Alation has chosen a path of interoperability. Our Open Connector Framework (OCF) lets you build connectors to third-party platforms, and our Open Data Quality Framework enables you to integrate best-of-breed data quality tools into Alation. 

“Alation had such good connectivity to third-party platforms that we wanted to go with them. In particular, they are tied very well to Snowflake and Tableau, our two most critical systems.”

- Joe Harrington, Director of Business Intelligence, Frontier Credit Union. 

Business users love Alation

Many catalogs offer great features for the data scientist but leave non-technical data users out in the cold. Not so Alation. We truly differentiate ourselves from the competition by making it easy for both technical and business users to quickly gain value from the catalog. 

For example, Alation’s intelligent SQL editor, Compose, lets technical folks write SQL queries and store them in Alation. Business users can reuse those queries or let Compose guide them through writing their own. Our Trust Flags clearly indicate endorsed (green), deprecated (red), and questionable (yellow) data or information. When in doubt, users can easily reach out to the data owner or steward right from the Alation page. 

“People take to Alation like a duck to water because it is so intuitive,”

- Nicole Guaetta-Hoffmann, CDMP, Data Architect, Veterans United Home Loans 

Best Value for the Price

While our customers give us high marks on ease of use, Alation is a powerful data intelligence platform that delivers both technical and business value. One Professional Services Manager at a computer software company with over 10,000 employees told TrustRadius: “Alation allows for more powerful data analysis, queries, and export of [those] queries to build data models and reports that lead to internal presentations. It's more user-friendly than Azure SQL, and more powerful than Microsoft Excel VBA.” 

Alation delivers value quickly 

Other catalog vendors may say they cost less than Alation, but if they don’t deliver value quickly and consistently, they will ultimately cost more in the long run. Our comprehensive feature set and out-of-the-box connectors to more than 80 data sources, the leading BI tools, and cloud data warehouse vendors mean our customers quickly realize value from the platform.  

“We chose Alation because of its cost and speed; it started providing value in just three weeks! We also chose it over other options because of its out-of-the-box compatibility with Redshift and Tableau,”

- Ku'uipo (Curry) Fales, AVP of Data Management at VillageCare, a managed healthcare organization in New York City. 

Measuring ongoing value with Alation

We walk alongside our customers in their journey to gain value not just from Alation but from their enterprise data initiatives. Alation provides organizations with the framework to measure the value of those initiatives and their impact on the business. Our recently launched Alation Data Culture Maturity Model helps customers assess the overall data maturity of their organization and outlines a path to growth. Finally, Alation Analytics helps monitor a customer’s data journey from day one, showing the true return on investment of building a data culture. 

Want to know more about Alation?

Experience Alation for yourself! Take a tour, attend a weekly demo, or schedule a personalized demo. You’ll see for yourself why our customers love Alation!