Data intelligence and management firm Alation is ramping up its EMEA business in various territories, as enterprises realise they need help in getting the most out of the data they are generating.
Alation is hosting the week-long IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley – which IT Europa is attending – and outlined how its intelligent data catalogue system was making it possible for organisations to line up their data ducks in the right order, to make sure the most important data sets were more widely available to staff to glean business insights from.
Satyen Sangani (pictured), CEO of Alation, explained why the firm was a useful addition to many firms' data strategies. He said: “I used to work at Oracle, and customers would spend $20m on software, and often they didn't know what to do with the data they were generating from it. They would spend more on services trying to make it work for them.”
Alation's system aims to empower every employee in an organisation to search, discover, trust and use data effectively, with the vendor investing in key areas such as semantics, context, personalisation and data exploration.
The company has around 300 customers, with about 25% of them outside North America, with the majority of these in EMEA. These include the likes of Marks & Spencer, The Very Group (who talked about their Alation system for retail at the event), Finnair and Societie Generale.
Steve Neat, general manager for Alation EMEA, said: “It never ceases to surprise me that some large organisations are so bad at getting what they need out of their data. A data catalogue reduces the time it takes to find the information you need, and with our system you don't need so many 'data stewards' in the organisation to capture information, and tell you what the most popular and useful data sets are, for instance.”
Over the last 12 months, the company's EMEA headcount has jumped from ten to 50, covering sales, pre-sales, partner enablement and other areas. At the moment in EMEA, the core business areas are the UK, DACH, the Nordics and Benelux.
The firm is currently hiring more staff in the Nordics, and also investing in growth in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle-East and South Africa, said Neat. “Some territory growth will be driven by partners”, he said. And as deploying and managing a data catalogue is often an ongoing process, there is potentially a big services opportunity for some partners, he added.
