As a business development representative at Attivio, I regularly speak to companies about their big data management challenges and possible technology solutions. Many of their pain points would resonate with organizations across a wide array of industries.
Shopping for a Data Catalog SolutionI recently had an exploratory call with the Senior Manager of Enterprise Data Management and the Director of Data Governance at a large, multinational financial services corporation. They are searching for technology to manage metadata with a focus on data quality; data governance; closing BI and analytics gaps; and enhancing their existing big data and cloud environments.
Like many financial services organizations, the company uses Cloudera for their Hadoop environment and plans to eventually move a lot of their information to the cloud. They’ve noticed a downside to the easy, organizational access to the Hadoop environment. Specifically, different users are pushing a lot of data into the tool, creating clutter and a need for tagging and sorting for better searchability. They also have to factor in the sources they use outside of Hadoop, including Teradata, Oracle, SQL Server, and Excel, creating a perfect use case scenario for adata catalog that can leverage information from sources both inside and outside of Hadoop. While they may recognize the value of understanding disparate data sources to know which data sets they should move into Hadoop and which they should not, they are also concerned with maintaining the ability for self-service data discovery.
Does any of this sound familiar? Check out this video that explains how Attivio’s Semantic Data Catalog helps companies find, understand, and unify disparate data across all enterprise silos.