Alation Accelerates Growth and Global Impact — and Welcomes 2 New Leaders

By Steve Neat

Published on May 11, 2023

Alation's Global Impact Grows with New Leaders | Alation

We’re excited to share that Alation’s momentum is picking up speed. After substantial growth and a major increase in cloud customers, the company has experienced a surge in our customer base. These metrics are a testament to our global expansion in EMEA and APAC. In this blog, I’ll detail how we’ve grown in EMEA specifically, sharing exciting updates and plans for the future.

But first: mark your calendars! Our revAlation London event returns for 2023. Stay tuned for more information on what’s sure to be another educational, memorable, and enlightening gathering of the data community.

Global growth led by EMEA

In EMEA, we’ve expanded our wide range of customers across retail, energy, and financial services including The Very Group, Vattenfall, and Raiffeisen Bank International.

The CDO of The Very Group, Steve Pimblett, is an Alation champion who’s overseen incredible momentum around data use within his own organisation. This multi-brand online retailer hosts thousands of products for sale on the internet and collects millions of bits and bytes of data across customer touchpoints each day. Under Pimblett’s leadership, 130 people at Very use Alation to drive excellence in data across all parts of the business.

The Very Group has “every type of digital media imaginable,” which Steve would be the first to admit makes it a bit of a data paradise! By enhancing that data-rich environment with Alation, Very Group employees are empowered to go after deeper insights and action across different business domains to help them to achieve their business goals.

Culture is critical

Undoubtedly, our product is a core reason for the continued success of the company, and analysts like BARC have named Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform a market leader in, for example, the BARC Score Data Intelligence Platforms Report. We’ve also had the pleasure of being recognised by peer user review site TrustRadius as a primary leader in the data catalog category, as well as in the data collaboration, data governance, and metadata management categories.

But I’d be remiss not to mention the value of an incredible culture. In the past 12 months alone, Alation has been recognised as:

On top of that, our CEO and co-founder, Satyen Sangani, was named to the US DataIQ Top 100. For these reasons, I’m thrilled to share that we’re expanding our EMEA presence by opening a new office in London this summer. This will enable us to better respond to growing regional market demand.

The power of partnerships

It takes a village to grow a company (and at this pace). Much of this success is driven by our deepening partnerships with Snowflake, AWS, and Databricks, with whom we share hundreds of joint customers. As a platform, we also offer connectors to more than 100 popular data sources, including integrations with Microsoft Excel, Slack, and Tableau, which simplify and accelerate workflows for anyone working with data across the modern data stack.

The customer and consultant partnerships we’ve made in the broader data-people community are also a big factor in our continued growth. Our deep bench of passionate support professionals has ramped up in-person training sessions and events this past year, including:

revAlation London, a two-day conference that drew 170+ attendees
Data Governance Workshops in London, Stockholm, Munich, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam
Women in Data Event: Planet Governance, The Natural History of Getting Data Governance Done with our Director of D&A Julie Smith and Nicola Ashkam AKA The Data Governance Coach (photo below).

The final update? To help us manage this growth, we’ve made two strategic additions to the leadership team with a new CMO and CFO.

The leadership team deepens its bench

We’re excited to welcome David Chao as Chief Marketing Officer and Jill Woodworth as Chief Financial Officer.

David Chao brings more than 15 years of experience building and scaling go-to-market functions for hyper-growth B2B enterprise SaaS companies. He was previously VP of Marketing at Datadog, as well as the VP and Head of Product Marketing at MuleSoft, where he oversaw critical growth, culminating in the company’s successful IPO in 2017 and acquisition by Salesforce the next year. As CMO, David will oversee our global marketing strategy.

Jill Woodworth has nearly 30 years of experience in finance. In her last role, as CFO for Peloton, she built the global finance team to support the company’s growth, led their IPO, and several other capital raises. Prior to Peloton, as Managing Director at J.P. Morgan, she advised companies on IPOs, financings, and M&A. As CFO, Jill will lead our global finance, IT, and legal functions.

Meet us in London!

This is just the latest in what has been an exciting past year for Alation since we announced $100M in ARR this past September. And while we’re in the “business” of B2B enterprise software, it’s the H2H — human-to-human — connections that make this work truly meaningful and rewarding.

On that note, be sure to join us for these events this year. We can’t wait to see you there!