Alation Announces Partnership with Snowflake to Drive Data Search & Discovery and Data Governance in the Data Cloud

Redwood City, Calif. – November 18, 2020 – Alation Inc. the data intelligence company, today announced a partnership with Snowflake, creator of the Data Cloud, to expand data search & discovery, drive data cloud governance, and simplify migration to Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Alation has achieved Elite status in the Snowflake Partner Network, the highest level for Snowflake technology partners.

Alation provides an intuitive, consumer-grade experience that enables companies to catalog a wide range of enterprise data assets, such as data stored on Snowflake and business intelligence reports, and adds business context such as terms, metrics, and domains. Snowflake customers can then share analytics, collaborate, understand popularity, top users, and other behavioral insights to improve decision making. Alation’s active data governance and guided stewardship enable tagging key datasets, classifying data, and notifying end users of policies to ensure compliance. With this partnership, joint customers can help ensure high quality catalog curation and compliance that can be trusted by a social, vibrant community of data consumers.

“Establishing a data culture is the number one priority of enterprises today. Yet they face challenges equipping their teams to find and understand data and its meaning, and to take responsibility and authority over its use. These challenges are compounded as enterprises accelerate their move to cloud-based data platforms,” said Kiran Narsu, Vice President, Business Development, Alation. “What’s exciting about working with Snowflake, is that our joint customers can accelerate adoption and use of Snowflake’s Data Cloud while fostering collaboration. As an Elite Tier partner to Snowflake, Alation continues to invest in tight integration between our product teams to ensure the highest quality customer experience.”

“To support Sainsbury’s in keeping customers at the heart of our decision making, we’re bringing together disparate and functionally siloed data assets across our Brands: making them usable and accessible by everyone. Whilst Snowflake provides the robust scalability and elasticity we need to securely hold enterprise volumes and variety of data, Alation supports our colleagues in swiftly navigating to the information they need,” said Helen Hunter, Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Sainsbury’s PLC. “With Alation, users across the enterprise can efficiently search for and discover data, regardless of location, and ensure that data is properly governed and used in a compliant manner.”

Performance and scalability, cost savings, and data democratization are key benefits of migrating data to the cloud. Alation provides insight into data popularity, usage, and users, and identifies data redundancies and data no longer in use. With Alation, organizations can determine their data migration plan to Snowflake Data Cloud, prioritize which datasets to migrate, which user groups to notify of the migration, eliminate data redundancies and improve operational cost in an informed and user-centric manner.

“Alation was critical in determining the priorities and sequence at which data assets and key user groups were migrated to Snowflake’s Data Cloud,” said Anthony Seraphim, Vice President of Data Governance, Texas Mutual Insurance. “Alation’s intuitive design allowed us to migrate our data and users with clarity and transparency, and because key user groups were notified that pertinent data was migrating, we saw greater adoption of the Data Cloud.”

“Data access and insights are essential components of an organization’s success today. We’re excited to partner with Alation to provide customers with the ability to search, discover, and govern data in the Data Cloud,” said Tarik Dwiek, Director of Technology Alliances, Snowflake. “This partnership is another example of Snowflake’s commitment to helping organizations democratize and mobilize their data for deep data insights.”

Learn more about Alation’s partnership with Snowflake on our partner page.