Deep Thoughts on Data Flow with Alation & Trifacta

Data lakes, while useful in helping you to capture all of your data, are only the first step in extracting the value of that data. Self-service analytics tools like Tableau help by democratizing the data analysis process, causing disruption to existing Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools from the likes of Informatica  and IBM Datastage. Adopting a self-service analytics solution is a step in the right direction, but most companies we encounter still haven’t solved the problem of how to make data easily accessible for a non-technical user.

We recently announced an integration with Trifacta to seamlessly integrate the Alation Data Catalog with self-service data prep applications to help you solve this issue. Bringing best of breed self-service data preparation together with data cataloging is a natural combination. Once someone has the ability to freely discover data on their own, it’s a natural leap to wonder why you can’t do the same thing with transformation, or find and import data sets into any visualization tool you’d like to use. The combination of Alation and Trifacta allows you to seamlessly complete this workflow and embrace self-service data along with your self-service analysis.

The Benefits of the Alation + Trifacta Integration

There are two things that stand out among the many benefits of a solution that uses Alation & Trifacta together:

1) You can now make legacy data available to a much wider audience – not only traditional data analysts or technical users but also business users. With Trifacta, a broad range of users can structure their own data for analysis. Alation can then help users find, understand, and trust the data that they want to work with in Trifacta. Additionally, because of the collaborative features found in the Alation Data Catalog, you also gain the ability for data to be easily shared, used and reused.

2) Alation provides visibility into how data is being used and by whom, along with the ability to rate the data assets for usefulness or data quality. You gain a level of transparency in understanding the context of data that you’re interested in. This creates a deeper level of trust in the organization that all parties accessing data have the tools available to harness its value.

During the recent DataWorks Summit held in Munich, Germany, GT Volpe, Alation’s Head of Customer Development in EMEA, and Bertrand Cariou, Senior Director of Solutions and Partner marketing at Trifacta, spoke to John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, to discuss the value of our partnership.