REDWOOD CITY, Calif., June 10, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alation, Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced a deepened integration with Databricks to deliver trusted data for AI initiatives to the enterprise. This strengthened partnership through the Alation Open Data Quality Initiative improves data reliability, streamlines compliance, and facilitates more effective decision-making. With improved data lineage visibility and data governance, data scientists, engineers, and AI/ML professionals can now confidently leverage high-quality data, powering transformative AI and data initiatives.

As enterprises embrace AI to innovate and drive decision-making, they encounter significant hurdles due to subpar data quality, disparate data silos, and inconsistent truths. These challenges render data too complex or inaccessible, severely impacting AI-driven initiatives. Forrester underscores this critical need for high-quality, readily available data, with 70% of enterprises currently leveraging generative AI and another 20% poised to explore its potential​​¹.

Alation and Databricks have strengthened their partnership to combat these challenges and enable AI/ML teams to efficiently find, understand, and trust information from diverse data sources. This deepened integration introduces tools, such as trust flags, impact analysis, and comprehensive data profiling, to safeguard data accuracy and integrity across the enterprise. These measures are essential for ensuring data consistency, accuracy, validity, completeness, timeliness, and uniqueness at scale—creating a single source of truth where high-quality, AI-ready data is readily accessible throughout the organization.

“High-quality, trusted data is not merely a strategic asset; it's the cornerstone of competitive advantage,” said John (JW) Williams, Executive Director of Enterprise Data at RaceTrac. “With Alation and Databricks, our teams can adeptly navigate our vast and complex data landscape. Alation allows users to find, understand, and utilize trusted data effectively, vital for making well-informed decisions and confidently advancing data and AI strategies. Alation enhances our ability to govern our enterprise lakehouse, which fosters trust in the integrity of our data. The Alation Data Intelligence Platform underpins this by providing an essential architecture that ensures all business teams have access to reliable and trusted data.”

“Organizations require complete visibility into their data estate to advance AI initiatives and foster a data culture,” said Roger Murff, VP of Technology Partners at Databricks. “Our deepened integration with Alation improves data trust and delivers a unified view, facilitating collaboration and smooth Data Intelligence Platform adoption and providing teams with AI-ready data, accelerating strategic AI projects. We look forward to strengthening our partnership with Alation to ensure comprehensive visibility and data reliability, empowering users to make smarter business decisions and develop dependable AI models.”

“In today's AI-driven environment, proprietary data is one of an organization's most crucial assets. However, its true value is only realized when teams can effectively find, understand, and trust this information,” said David Chao, CMO and Head of Technology Alliances. “The complexity of the modern data landscape can make locating and verifying reliable data exceedingly difficult. Data quality remains the primary hurdle in deploying dependable AI solutions, and the challenge of maintaining high data standards is intensifying. Our enhanced partnership with Databricks specifically targets these data quality challenges, establishing a new benchmark for data integrity. This collaboration is designed to accelerate AI development and deployment, enabling enterprises to achieve deeper insights and superior outcomes more efficiently.” 

Alation deepened its partnership with Databricks to further instill trust in lakehouse data with: 

• Data Quality Monitoring: Users can effortlessly monitor data quality metrics by leveraging Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring results within Alation, providing all users, including AI/ML engineers, with comprehensive data health insights and controls. An API-driven Data Health tab in Alation increases organizational visibility and boosts confidence in AI and data-driven initiatives. 
• Data Quality Visualization: The integration with Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring converts complex profiling and drift metrics into clear, actionable rules and visualizations on the Data Health tab. This empowers business users to intuitively understand and assess data quality issues, such as null values, facilitating well-informed, strategic decision-making without technical expertise. 
• Data Quality Insights: Integrating Databricks Lakehouse Monitoring with Alation’s intuitive interface enhances data accessibility and trust across the organization by exposing data quality profiles identified in Databricks to a broader audience. This provides users of all technical levels with clear, actionable insights, fostering a deeper comprehension and trust in vital data quality metrics. By making data quality management accessible to everyone, it enhances confidence in the data utilized across the entire organization.
  

Alation at Databricks Data + AI Summit 2024

• Visit booth #45 to learn how Alation ensures trusted data for AI initiatives.
• Join the "Delivering Data Products in a Data Mesh at Kroger" breakout session, featuring Nate Sylvester, Vice President of Architecture at 84.51˚/Kroger, and David Sweenor, Director of Product Marketing at Alation. They will explore how 84.51˚/Kroger has embraced a federated, people-first approach to data democratization. Learn how they leverage Alation and Unity Catalog to access high-quality, analytics- and AI-ready data.

Read “New Data Quality Solutions with Alation and Databricks” to learn more about this integration.

About Alation
Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, enabling self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI-ready data. More than 550 enterprises, including Cisco, Nasdaq, Pfizer, Salesforce, and Virgin Australia, have built a data culture and improved data-driven decision-making with Alation. Alation has been named to Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list four times, is a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ in tech and Best Workplaces™ for Women, and recognized as a 2022 and 2023 UK’s Best Workplaces™. For more information, visit www.alation.com.

Media Contact
Lauren Lloyd
Director, Corporate Communications
541-490-6115
lauren.lloyd@alation.com

¹ Forrester blog: Data Quality Is Now The Primary Factor Limiting GenAI Adoption, by Brett Kahnke and Michele Goetz, February 26, 2024