Alation Delivers MicroStrategy Integration for Governance for Insight

Redwood City Calif – March 2, 2017 – Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced its data catalog now integrates seamlessly with MicroStrategy. The integration creates a single source of reference for MicroStrategy users, allowing them to easily find, understand and trust data from sources across their organizations. Alation catalogs all the data assets stored in business intelligence and analytics tools, including MicroStrategy and Tableau, to provide the industry’s first Governance for Insight solution designed for agile self-service analytics environments.

Enterprises are shifting to self-service analytics environments to provide data access to executives, analysts, data scientists and data stewards. These users are increasingly the primary consumers of data for analysis. Alation’s integration with MicroStrategy supports this changing paradigm with a collaborative data catalog that brings data discovery and governance to a broader set of users, increasing the impact and value of data.

“Alation’s Governance for Insight initiative provides a catalog-first governance strategy for MicroStrategy users, allowing them to use the Alation Data Catalog to quickly find the data they need while propagating the best practices that ensure their analysis within MicroStrategy is accurate and insightful,” said Jennifer Rosenberg Baker, SVP, product management, MicroStrategy Incorporated. “This grassroots approach to a governance tool is key for our customers as more and more users work with data in the enterprise. Together, Alation and MicroStrategy are making data more valuable for business and IT users alike.”

For Governance for Insight to be successful, it must enable both empowerment and accuracy. This requires cataloging the entire data usage workflow for all data consumers, from the moment data is stored in a raw format through the interpretation of data by business users in reporting, dashboarding and analysis software.

With this integration, MicroStrategy reports and dashboards are automatically crawled and inventoried, including the metrics and dimensions. In addition to creating an inventory entry for every report and dashboard, Alation automatically parses the usage log for each data asset to create a rich catalog based on business understanding of the data assets’ popularity and usage. This catalog with business and usage context then feeds intelligent search results for data consumers interested in finding, reusing or building on the prior work of MicroStrategy reports and dashboards. The result is increased analyst productivity.

In addition to productivity impact, Alation delivers features for curation and stewardship that complement MicroStrategy’s governance framework. Data lineage provides visibility into the complete data pipeline: from storage through visualization. Every Alation catalog page for a MicroStrategy asset can be tagged and flagged by data stewards for the rest of the organization. This Governance for Insight approach helps MicroStrategy users share best practices broadly to govern self-service analytics deployments in a way that promotes flexible data usage as an equally important component of a complete data governance program.

“Our partnership with MicroStrategy shows our commitment to meeting the needs of our customers by cataloging the tools modern data consumers use most,” said Aaron Kalb, head of product, Alation. “We’re excited to be bringing the power of Governance for Insight to MicroStrategy and enabling more users to quickly find accurate answers to the toughest business questions.”

Alation uses machine-learning algorithms to automatically inventory data and enrich it with the context necessary to find, understand and trust the data. Active and passive signals aid users as they work through their analysis. For example, query components that have been re-used time and again to analyze data generate proactive best practice recommendations for analysts, and data sources are ranked by popularity (frequency and recency of use) to tell users which data sources are most relevant for the analysis at hand. When updated with an organization’s data governance policies, the catalog can warn analysts if the accuracy of their data is jeopardized by upstream data quality issues or faulty data preparation logic that might negatively impact the insights used for decision-making.

lation’s integration with MicroStrategy extends its ecosystem of strategic partnerships with top vendors including Teradata, Tableau, Cloudera, Hortonworks and Altiscale. To learn more, please view the “Cataloging MicroStrategy” blog post by Kalb. Attendees of the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Texas on March 6–9 can attend Rita Sallam’s Hype Cycle session on March 5 or drop by Alation’s booth #528 to hear about its collaborative data catalog and Governance for Insight.