Alation Joins Snowflake Open Semantic Interchange: Unlocking Data and AI Interoperability Across the Ecosystem

Redwood City, Calif — September 23, 2025 — Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced it is joining Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, and other industry leaders to launch the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a new open source initiative that creates a universal specification for all companies to standardize their fragmented data definitions with an open, vendor-neutral semantic model specification. OSI aims to enhance interoperability across various tools and platforms, offering enterprises a vendor-neutral specification that provides consistent metrics and definitions across dashboards, notebooks, and machine learning models. 

OSI is collectively championed by Snowflake and ecosystem partners across multiple domains and industries, including business intelligence (BI), data governance, data engineering, AI, financial services, and manufacturing. Its goal is to create a common, vendor-agnostic specification that defines semantic metadata in a standard, open format. By facilitating seamless semantic metadata exchange, the initiative will accelerate the adoption of AI and BI tools to streamline operations and reduce complexity. This, in turn, allows organizations to unify their data definitions, leading to more comprehensive and accurate data analysis and data product sharing to fuel AI innovation. 

Alation is one of the most open and extensible agentic data intelligence platforms and is committed to providing customers with continued independence and interoperability of metadata. In 2023, Alation launched the Partner Program for Open Connector Framework to deliver connectivity to more than 80 data sources, showcasing its commitment to open extensibility. In May 2025, Alation joined the Open Data Product Technical Steering Committee (TSC), furthering its support to help partners unlock the full potential of their data in an open and interoperable way. 

As a launch partner of OSI, Alation will help build a transparent and community-driven standard for semantic model sharing, ensuring that business metrics and definitions remain consistent and interoperable. This collaborative effort will foster innovation and provide greater flexibility and efficiency for organizations building their data infrastructure.

“Alation has always believed that true innovation and delighting our customers requires openness and interoperability. By contributing to the Open Semantic Interchange, we are ensuring that organizations are not locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem,” Anthony Lempelius, Director of Technology Alliances and Channel Partnerships, Alation. “Instead, they gain the flexibility to define and share consistent metrics across their preferred tools and platforms. This vendor-neutral approach empowers enterprises to accelerate data-driven innovation while preserving choice and transparency in how they build their data and AI strategies.”

“The Open Semantic Interchange is a critical step toward unlocking a new era of interoperability across the data and AI ecosystem,” said Josh Klahr, Director of Analytics Product Management, Snowflake. “By working with partners like Alation, this initiative ensures a common, standardized understanding of semantic data across tools. This will enhance interoperability and vendor neutrality, providing organizations with greater flexibility and efficiency in building their data infrastructure, and simplifying data operations.” 

OSI is poised to revolutionize interoperability within the data and AI ecosystem by providing a transparent, community-driven standard. This collaborative effort simplifies data operations, unlocks new possibilities for innovation, and ultimately gives organizations the flexibility and efficiency they need to build a future-ready data infrastructure.