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>> Hey everyone.
Welcome to this CUBE conversation.
I'm your host, Lisa Martin
Raj Gossain joins me now,
the chief product officer at Alation.
Raj, great to have you on theCUBE.
Welcome.
>> It's great to be here, Lisa.
And I've been a fan for a while
and excited to have a chance to talk with you live.
>> And we've got some exciting stuff to talk about Alation
in terms of the success of the enterprise market.
I see more than 25% of the fortune 100 doing great
there is customers Alation and Snowflake.
Before we get into your exciting news.
Talk to me a little bit
about the evolution of the partnership.
>> Yeah, no, absolutely.
So we've always been a close partner and integrator
with Snowflake and last year,
Snowflake became an investor in Alation
and they participated in our series D round.
And the thing I'm most excited about beyond that
is we were announced in the Snowflake summit
back in June to be their
data governance partner of the year
for the second year running.
And so we've always had a closer relationship
with Snowflake, both at the goto market level
and at the product level.
And the stuff that we're about to talk about
is a testament to that.
>> Absolutely it is.
So talk to us before we get into the announcement.
What you're seeing in the market
as organizations are really becoming much more serious
about being data driven and building a data culture.
What are you seeing with respect
to enterprises as well as those smaller folks?
>> Yeah, no, it's a great question.
I mean, you hear the tropes,
data is the new oil data is like water, it's essential.
And we're seeing that very consistently
across every customer, every segment,
every geo that we talk to.
I think the challenges that organizations are seeing
that are leading to the amazing growth
that we've seen at Alation,
are there's so much data.
They don't know where it resides.
You've got silos or islands of knowledge
that exist across the enterprise
and they need a data intelligence platform
to bring it all together,
to help them make sense of it
and ultimately build a data culture
that lets their employees make data driven decisions
as opposed to relying on gut.
And so those are some of the macro trends that we're seeing
and with the migration of data to the cloud
and in particular Snowflake,
it seemed like a huge opportunity
for us to partner even more closely with Snowflake.
And we're excited about the progress
that we've seen with them thus far.
>> All right, let's get right into it.
So first of all, define a data culture
and then talk to us about how Alation and Snowflake
are helping organizations to really achieve that.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
The company vision that we have at Alation
is to empower a curious and rational world.
And what that really means is we want to deliver
solutions that drive curiosity and drive rational behavior.
So making decisions based on data and insights
as opposed to gut
or the highest paid person's opinion or what have you.
And so delivering a data culture, building a data culture
which is something we hear
from all the CEOs that we talk to is,
hey, Alation help us drive data literacy
across the organization,
provide that single source of reference.
So if anybody has a question about
do we have data that answers this,
or what kind of performance are we seeing
in this product area?
Give me a starting point for my data exploration journey.
And that's really where Alation
and our data intelligence solutions
kind of come into the play.
>> So unpack Alation cloud service for Snowflake.
Talk to us about what it is, why you're doing it,
what the significance of this partnership
and this solution is delivering.
>> Absolutely.
So the Alation cloud service for Snowflake
is a brand new offering that we just brought to market.
And the intent really was,
we've had massive success in the global 2000.
You mentioned the progress that we've had
with fortune 100 customers.
We see the need for data culture
and data literacy and governance in organizations
that are massive global multinational enterprises
all the way down to divisions
of an organization or even mid-market and SMB companies.
And so we thought there was a huge opportunity
to really drive data culture
for those organizations that are adopting Snowflake
but still need that data intelligence overlay
across the data that's in the Snowflake cloud.
And so what we did is we launched the Alation cloud service
for Snowflake as a free trial
and then low cost purchase solution that can be adopted
for less than a hundred thousand dollars a year.
>> Got it.
So from a target market perspective that lower end
of the market for of course, these days Raj,
as we talk about every company,
regardless of size,
regardless of industry and location,
has to be a data company.
Getting there and really defining and going
on a journey to get there is really complex.
So you're going now down market
to meet those customers where they are.
How will Alation cloud service for Snowflake
help those customers,
those smaller customers,
really become data driven and adopt a data culture.
>> Yeah, yeah.
It's a great question.
I think the biggest goal that we had was making it
really simple and easy for them to begin this journey.
So we are now live in the Snowflake partner connect portal.
And if someone wants to experience the power
of Alation cloud service for Snowflake
they just need to go to that portal, click the Alation tile.
And literally within less than two minutes
a brand new instance of Alation is spun up.
Their Snowflake data is automatically being cataloged
as part of this trial.
And they have 14 days to go
through this experience and get a sense
of the power of Alation to give them insights
into what's in their Snowflake platform,
what governance options they can layer
on top of their Snowflake data cloud
and how the data is transforming across their organization.
>> So talk to me about who you're talking to
within a customer.
I was looking at some data that Alation provided to me
and I see that according to Gartner,
data culture is priority number one
for chief data officers.
But for those smaller organizations
do they have chief data officers?
Is that responsibility line still with the CIO?
Who are you engaging with?
>> Yeah, it's a really great question.
I think the larger organizations that we sell to,
definitely have a CDO,
and CDO sometimes is a chief data and analytics officer,
in smaller organizations,
or even in divisions of big companies
that might be target customers for ACS for Snowflake,
could be a VP of analytics,
could be a head of marketing operations.
Could be a data engineering function,
so that might roll up into the IT.
And so I think that's interesting,
is we wanted to take the friction
out of the experience process
and the trial process,
and whoever is responsible for the Snowflake instance
and leveraging Snowflake for data and analytics,
they can explore and understand what the
power Alation layered on top of Snowflake
can provide for them.
>> Okay.
So another thing that I uncovered
in researching for this segment
is McKinsey says data culture is decision culture.
I thought that was a really profound statement
but it's also such a challenge to get there
as organizations of all sizes
are on various points in their journey
to become data driven.
What does that mean?
How do Alation and Snowflake help customers
really achieve that data culture
so that they can really have that decision culture
so they can make faster, better data based decisions?
>> Yeah, so I think a huge part of it
if we think about our big area of focus,
how do we enable users to find, understand,
trust, govern and use data within Snowflake
in this instance?
And so step one to drive data culture is how
do you provide a single source of reference
a search box, frankly,
Google for your data environment
so that you can actually find data.
Then how do you understand it?
What's in there?
What does it mean?
What are the relationships between these data objects?
Can I trust this?
Is this sandbox data
or is this production data that can be used
for reporting and analytics?
How do I govern the data?
So I know who's using it
who should use it, what policies are there.
And so if we go through the set of features that we've built
into Alation cloud service for Snowflake
it enables us to deliver
on that promise.
At the very end,
resulting in the ability to explore the data that exists
in the Snowflake platform as well.
>> Let's go ahead and unpack that.
Now, talk to me about some
of the key capabilities of the solution
and what it's enabling organizations to achieve.
>> Yeah, so it starts with cataloging the data itself.
We are the data catalog company.
We basically define that category.
And so step one is how do we connect to Snowflake
and automatically ingest all the metadata that exists
within that Snowflake cloud,
as well as extract the lineage relationships between tables.
So you can understand how the data is transforming
within the Snowflake data cloud.
And so that provides visibility to begin that fine journey.
How do I actually discover data.
On the understand and trust front,
I think where things get really interesting
is we've integrated deeply
with Snowflake's new data governance features.
So they've got data policies
that provide things like row level security
and data masking.
We integrate directly with those policies,
extract them, ingest them into Alation.
so that they can be discovered,
can be easily applied or added to other data sets
within Snowflake directly from the Alation UI.
So now you've got policies layered
on top of your data environment.
Snowflake's introduced tagging
and classification capabilities.
We automatically extract and ingest those tags.
They're surfaced in Alation.
So if somebody looks for a data set
that they're not familiar with,
they can see, oh,
here are the policies that this data set is applied to.
Here are the tags that are applied.
And so Alation actually becomes almost
like a user interface
to the data that exists within that Snowflake platform.
And then maybe just two other things
with the lineage that we extract.
One of the most important things that you can deliver
for users is impact analysis.
Hey, if I'm going to deprecate this table,
or if I'm going to make a change
to what this table definition is,
what are the downstream objects
and users that should know about that?
So, hey, if this table's going away
and my Tableau report over here is going to stop working,
boy it'd be great to be able to get visibility into that
before that change is made,
we can do that automatically within the Alation UI
and really just make it easier
for somebody to govern and manage the data that exists
within the Snowflake data cloud.
>> So easier to govern and manage the data.
Let's go up a level or two.
Talk to me about some of the business outcomes
that this solution is going to help organizations to achieve.
We talked about every company these days
has to be a data company.
Consumers expect this very personalized,
relevant experience.
What are you thinking some of the outcomes are going to be
that this technology and this partnership's going to unlock.
>> Yeah, no, I think step one,
and this has always been a huge area of focus for us
is just simply driving business productivity.
So the data that we see in talking to CDOs and CDAOs,
is the onboarding and getting productive,
the time it takes to onboard
and get a data analyst productive
it can be 9 to 12 months,
and we all know the battle for talent
these days is significant.
And so if we can provide a solution
and this is exactly what we do,
that enables an organization to get a data analyst
productive in weeks instead of months,
or potentially even a year,
the value that that analyst can deliver to the organization
goes up dramatically
because they're spending less time looking for data
and figuring out who knows what about the data.
They can go to Alation, get those insights
and start answering business questions
as opposed to trying to wrangle or figure out
does the data exist
and where does it exist?
So that's one key dimension.
I'd say the other one that I'd highlight
is just being able to have a governance program
that is monitored, managed and well understood
so that whether it's dealing with CCPA or GDPR,
some of the regulatory regimes,
the ability for an organization
to feel like they have control over their data
and they understand where it is,
who's using it and how it's being used.
Those are hugely important business outcomes
that CIOs and CDOs tell us they need.
And that's why we built the
Alation cloud service for Snowflake
>> On the first front.
One of the things that popped into my mind
in terms of really enabling workforce productivity
workforce efficiency,
getting analysts ramped up dramatically faster
also seems to me to be something
that your customers can leverage
from a talent attraction and retention perspective
which in today's market is critical.
>> So glad you mentioned that.
That's actually one of the key pillars
that we highlight as well
is if you give great tools to employees
they're going to be happier and you'll be a preferred employer
and people are going to feel like, oh
this is an organization that I want to work at
because they're making my job easier
and they're making it easier for me to deliver value
and be productive to the organization.
And that's absolutely critical.
This war for talent that everybody talks about.
It's real and great self-service tools that are
empowering to employees are the things that are
the things that are going to differentiate companies
and allow them to unleash the power of data.
>> Unleash the power of data,
really use it to the competitive advantage that it can
and should be used for.
When you look at customers that are on that journey
that data cataloging journey,
you probably see such a variety of locations about
where they are in that journey.
Do you see a common thread.
When you're in customer conversations?
Is there kind of a common denominator
that you speak to where you really know
Alation and Snowflake here is absolutely the right thing.
>> Yeah, no, it's a good question.
I would actually say the fact
that a customer is on Snowflake ,
they're already a step up on that maturity curve.
One of the big use cases that we see
with customers that is leading
to the need for data intelligence solutions
that that Alation can deliver,
is digital transformation and cloud migration.
We've got legacy data on prem.
We know we need to move to the cloud
to get better agility,
better scaling, perhaps reduced costs, et cetera.
And so I think step one on that qualification criteria
or that maturity journey is, Hey
if you're already in Snowflake that's a great sign,
because you're recognizing the power
of a data cloud platform and warehouse like Snowflake.
And so that's a great signal to us
that this is a customer that wants to
really better understand how they can get value
out of their solution.
I think the next step
on that journey is a recognition that they're not
utilizing the data that they have as effectively
as they can and should be.
And their employees are still struggling
with where does the data exist?
Can I trust it?
Who do I know tends to be more important
than do I have a tool that will help me understand the data?
And so customers that are asking those sorts
of questions are ideal customers
for the Alation cloud service for Snowflake solution.
>> So enabling those customers to get their hands on it
there's a free trial.
Talk to us about that.
Where can the audience go to actually click and try?
>> Absolutely.
So we'll be doing our usual marketing
and promotion of this
but what I'm super excited about again, I mentioned earlier
this is part of our cloud native multi-tenant architecture.
We are live in the Snowflake partner connect portal.
And so if you are logged into Snowflake and are an admin,
you can go to the partner connect portal
and you will see a tile.
I think it's alphabetically sorted
and Alation starts with a so pretty easy to find.
I don't think you'll have to do too much searching.
And literally all you have to do is click on that tile,
answer a couple quick questions.
And in the background in about two minutes,
your Alation instance will get spun up.
We will have sample data sets in there.
There's some guided tours,
that you can walk through to kind of get a feel
for the power of Snowflake.
So policy center, lineage,
tags, our intelligent SQL tool that allows you to
smartly query the Snowflake data cloud
and publish queries, share queries with others,
collaborate on them for greater insights.
And as you would expect with any online free trial,
we've got a built in chat bot.
So if you have a question,
want to get a better sense of how a particular feature works
or curious about how Alation might work in other areas,
you can ask a question to the chat bot
and we've got product specialists on the back end
that can answer questions.
So we really want to make that journey
as seamless and easy as possible.
And hopefully that results in enough interests
that the customer wants to
or the trial user wants to become a customer.
And that's where our great sales organization
will kind of take the baton from there.
>> And there's the objective there,
and I'm sure Raj folks can find out about the free trial
and access it, you mentioned through the marketplace.
More information on Alation.com.
I imagine they can go there to access it as well
>> A hundred percent.
Alation.com.
We're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn, but yeah,
if you have any questions,
can just search for Alation cloud service for Snowflake
or just go to the Alation.com website absolutely.
>> All right.
Alation cloud service for Snowflake.
Congratulations on the launch to you
and the entire Alation team.
We look forward to hearing customer success stories
and really seeing those business outcomes realized
in the next few months.
Raj, thanks so much for your time.
>> Thank you so much, Lisa.
It's great to talk to you.
>> Likewise, Raj Gossain.
I'm Lisa Martin.
Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation.
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