One of the paradoxes of today's data-driven world is that the very data we seek for competitive advantage can be both a curse and a blessing. Businesses need the right data to gain a leg up, but each new bit they acquire makes it harder to uncover the data they need.

 

That's where Alation says it can help, with a new product focused on helping enterprises find the information that will help them get ahead. Alation can simplify data access and make it easier for organizations to get the insights they're after. It offers collaborative analytics, data search and discovery, data optimization and effective data governance.

 

"Another way of understanding information is by looking at the human activity surrounding it," Sangani explained. "Like Google, we crawl hundreds or thousands of data systems within an enterprise and look at not just the data but the usage logs."

Equipped with that information, Alation generates a rich, centralized inventory of data -- including details that might otherwise be visible only to machines -- and can tell users the fastest way to find the right database, formulate a query, ask an expert or identify a best practice. "Alation is used by companies including eBay and Square.

  Author: Katherine Noyes

  Publish Date: 31/03/2015

 

Source: www.computerworld.com