Alation Partners with Hortonworks, Lowering the Barrier to Analyst Data Access on Hadoop

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – June 22, 2016 – Alation, Inc.,the data intelligence company, today announced certification of its Alation platform with the Hortonworks Data Platform™ (HDP) and interoperability with Apache Tez™, the popular processing engine for Apache Hadoop™. Now analysts can more easily find and understand data in Hadoop using Alation for increased productivity and maximization of enterprise Hadoop investments.

Data analysts familiar with SQL still often struggle with finding and understanding data in Hadoop despite the rapid enterprise adoption of Hadoop as a big data store. Alation’s certification with Hortonworks lowers the barrier to data access on Hadoop by providing a single, central data catalog featuring embedded search, query and collaboration tools for working across big data systems, including databases and Hadoop.

With today’s news, Alation provides certified support for Tez, an open source framework under the Apache Software Foundation for YARN-based, data processing applications in Hadoop. The move further expands Alation’s Hadoop ecosystem through partnerships with leading Hadoop vendors including Cloudera, Altiscale and now Hortonworks. Alation is empowering data analysts to tap into Hadoop as a real business tool with one out-of-the-box data access solution, forgoing the need for specialized coding expertise beyond standard SQL.

Benefits of Alation’s new certification include:

• Increased accessibility of Hadoop for data analysts and analytics teams that now have actionable access to an automated and up-to-date catalog via the Tez processing framework, in addition to existing support for HDFS files, Apache Hive™ tables and Cloudera Impala queries.

• Faster discovery of data with the Alation data search interface that surfaces results based on observed data usage in addition to typical search criteria matches.

• Improved analyst collaboration on Hadoop with tools for sharing, auditing and commenting on queries through access to common distributions – such as Tez.

“Alation’s partnership with Hortonworks marks a significant expansion of our Hadoop ecosystem,” said Venky Ganti, co-founder and chief technology officer at Alation. “Our support for the major commercial Hadoop distributions and common processing engines means analysts can easily find, understand and trust data on Hadoop without having to rely on tribal knowledge, learn new technical skills or query tools. By lowering this barrier for analysts, Alation helps enterprises expand the access of their business analytic teams beyond just the pre-formatted, well structured data in the data warehouse to raw and prepared data stored on Hadoop. The result is organizations can provide easier access to all analysts and realize more value quickly from their data.”

“Hortonworks is pleased to work with Alation to help organizations derive more value from their data from Hadoop and the Hortonworks Data Platform, in particular,” said Matt Morgan, vice president of Product and Alliance Marketing at Hortonworks. “As enterprises continue to run on data, Hortonworks and Alation share the commitment of empowering them with actionable intelligence. When analysts can more easily find and understand data in Hadoop, the result is increased productivity and maximization of enterprise Hadoop investments. ”Alation’s collaborative data platform combines the power of machine learning with human insight to centralize an organization’s knowledge of data – automatically capturing information on what the data describes, where the data comes from, who’s using it and how it’s used. This allows stakeholders across organizations to share knowledge, exchange ideas and quickly find the answers they need.

Attend Alation’s Customer Talk at Hadoop Summit San Jose

• Session title: “How Hadoop and a Modern Data Platform Can Enable Transformation in Healthcare”

• Featuring Beata Puncevic, ‎Director at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan

• Tuesday, June 28 from 4:10 – 4:50 p.m. PT

• Details available at: http://hadoopsummit.org/san-jose/agenda/

Kulesa Faul for Alation alation@kulesafaul.com (650) 922-7287