Alation Introduces Enterprise Data Accessibility Platform

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 31, 2015 – Alation, the data intelligence company, came out of stealth today with a new software platform designed to empower people inside enterprises to easily find, understand, use and govern their data for faster and better business decisions. Alation’s data accessibility platform is generally available now and used in production at leading data-driven organizations like eBay, MarketShare and Inflection for collaborative analytics, data search and discovery, data optimization and effective data governance.

Alation simplifies data access and accelerates time-to-insight for everyone inside of an organization. Combining the power of machine learning with human insight, Alation centralizes an organization’s knowledge of data, automatically capturing information on what the data describes, where the data comes from, who’s using it and how it’s used. This enables amazing search and fast collaboration between analysts, stewards, data consumers and IT by enabling them to share knowledge, exchange ideas and quickly find the answers they need.

Our customers have just given up on trying to build that one system that contains all of the answers…

– Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation.

Alation Makes the Right Data Accessible – Easy to Find, Easy to Understand, Easy to Use

Data-driven companies today suffer from data complexity and data sprawl in both analytical and OLTP systems. Previous approaches to consolidating such vast amounts of data have fallen short. Despite massive investments in data management platforms such as Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics tools, enterprises and government still need to hire teams of consultants, data scientists and business analysts to get timely insights about the business.

“Our customers have just given up on trying to build that one system that contains all of the answers,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation. “The data is changing too fast, there are just too few analysts, and the business’ appetite for information is insatiable.

Alation is a system that tells the fastest way to get the right answer, whether it’s finding the right database, learning about best practice methods, appropriately modifying a query or asking an expert. Our founding team has the right combination of deep enterprise, design, engineering and search expertise to address the problem of making data accessible. It’s a difficult technological challenge, but even more amazing human challenge. We’re thrilled that our customers are now able to talk about what we’ve achieved together.”

Unlike point solutions that are constrained to specific use cases or top-down solutions that require extraordinary human effort, Alation was designed from the ground up for simplification and automation. Using a combination of machine learning and human insight, Alation enables enterprises to gain a deeper understanding of their data.

Today, Alation is delivering proven customer success in four core solution areas:

• Collaborative Analytics – Alation improves analyst productivity, delivers faster time-to-insight and lowers the cost of hiring and retaining analysts.

• Data Search and Discovery – Alation’s unified search means analysts, data scientists, stewards, and data consumers can find the information they need, faster.

• Data Optimization – Alation helps organizations realize infrastructure cost savings and a more efficient data infrastructure.

• Effective Data Governance – Alation empowers data governance initiatives resulting in lower costs of compliance, lower operational risk, increased productivity for stewards and cost savings by automating the key areas of the governance process.

Customers report incredible results across these use cases – including reduction in analyst on-boarding from years to months, ad hoc queries written in less than half the time and significant cost savings based on the identification of redundant data warehouse objects and reduced cost of governing data. Alation is used by some of the world’s largest data-driven organizations, with tens of thousands of employees, which manage petabytes of data and thousands of databases. Customers include eBay, MarketShare, Inflection and Invoice2Go, among others.

Availability

The Alation platform is available immediately. For more information, email info@alation.com.

Supporting Quotes

By using Alation, our analysts are realizing 50 percent or more in time savings for composing, sharing and learning queries. What’s especially valuable is that Alation permits easy data exploration and helps us create ‘data stories’ for MarketShare clients. That’s important because we don’t just toss reports at our clients, we deliver the complete story and context surrounding the data and results, showing the assumptions we made and how we came to our conclusions.

– Satya Ramachandran, SVP of Engineering and Managing Director, MarketShare

Alation has the potential to change the playing field for data governance and data management for analytics. There is a definite trust issue between the users of data sources and the managers of those sources. Bridging the gap to empower the entire organization to fully leverage enterprise and big data sources is the missing link. Alation promises to bridge that gap.

– John L. Myers, Managing Research Director for Business Intelligence, Enterprise Management Associates

eBay’s business is driven by developing a deeper understanding of its customers, both buyers and sellers, which comes from analyzing the vast and rich data that makes up the fabric of eBay. We are excited to partner with Alation to drive both the efficiency and effectiveness of our data and analytics by accelerating our data governance initiatives, establishing a common framework for surfacing best practices or knowledge experts, and quickly locating and building upon existing analyses more easily. We’re excited to partner with innovative companies like Alation to help drive our business.

– Zoher Karu, VP of Global Customer Optimization and Data, eBay

Alation has really empowered our entire organization to be more data-driven by writing and running queries in the browser. It’s allowed our team to collaborate and share queries with each other, reducing the amount of repeated work by up to 20 percent. And the ability to store written queries in a workspace that’s searchable has proved useful in speeding our data analysis and allowing non-technical users to find real-time information on their own. The automation and query composition capabilities delivered by Alation has allowed Inflection to enhance collaboration, reduce time-to-insight, and increase speed of analysis and sharing amongst our analysts.

– Mark Peters, VP of Analytics, Inflection