Alation Launches First Partner Program

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Data catalog company Alation has unveiled its first partner program, designed to foster successful enterprise-wide deployment of data catalogs.

The Alation Partner Program launched with a select 12 partners, including Agilisium Consulting, Information Asset, Tableau and Teradata. Through the partnerships, Alation allows customers to build metadata management strategies that leverage a data catalog as the single source of reference for the entire enterprise.

The company also has partnered with analyst firm Eckerson Group to launch Alation Accelerate, a training program designed to support enterprise-wide data catalog adoption.

Alation’s Michael Doane

Michael Doane, Alation’s director of business development, tells Channel Partners his company has a number of long-standing partnerships with technology and services organizations including Teradata, Tableau, Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Hortonworks, Cloudera, Paxata and Trifacta. These partnerships have “played a key role in Alation’s growth to date and the successful implementation of data catalogs in over 100 organizations,” he said.

“The launch of the [partner program] represents a long-term commitment from Alation to our prospects and customers to connect them with the best organizations dedicated to growing data cataloging deployments to enterprise-wide success,” he said. “While defining the (program), we decided to bolster our technology partnerships with regional systems-integration relationships to assist our customers in implementation areas more critical to enterprise-wide deployments, including metadata integration, data governance and self-service analytics.”

With a data catalog, metadata can be used to drive proactive data recommendations on what data assets to reuse given the context of an analytics inquiry, the company said.

“The program has introduced us to some new partners contributing to our rapid revenue growth,” Doane said. “In the last

two quarters, partners have brought us opportunities that have included introductions to the largest telco in (Australia-New Zealand) and PepsiCo. In addition to those new opportunities, existing relationships rolled into the program, like Teradata, [which] is a global reseller of Alation, have been a contributor to our revenue growth for some time, both in North America as well as Europe and Asia. The [program] allows us to offer our customers offerings in regions where we naturally would not be able to scale to being a young company, and in subject areas like data governance and metadata management, where there are long-standing experts at systems integrators who can bring their knowledge to bear on how to adopt a data catalog to compliment those programs.”

Operating in a “new and rapidly growing market,” Alation is focused on building a strong global community of technology partners, resellers, data governance subject matter experts and SIs, Doane said.

“Our team works with some of the most demanding and innovative customers to manage metadata in the cloud and deploy data lakes which are often hundreds of terabytes,” said Raj Babu, Agilisium’s vice president of customer success. “Alation gives us and our customers the insight and visibility into these vast data holdings for more agile data governance and greater confidence in their cloud-based data initiatives.”