Databricks Data + AI Summit 2024 | Diby Malakar

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Diby Malakar

Vice President of Product Management

Alation

Alation partners with Databricks, Snowflake to catalog data for AI

With the rise of artificial intelligence has come the rise of data storage and analytics, which are essential for companies attempting to integrate AI into their business operations.Alation Inc., a data catalog tool, has become the trusted source for 40% of Fortune 100 companies looking to ready their data for AI without breaking the bank.Alation’s Diby Malakar talks about new collaborations with Snowflake and Databricks.“One of the challenges that I see customers facing today is the lack of trusted data,” said Diby Malakar (pictured), vice president of product management at Alation. “Budgets are not getting any bigger — a lot of pressure that customers have, CIOs have, to do more with less

play_circle_outline Integration with Snowflake and Databricks for data quality monitoring

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Diby Malakar | Alation

Diby Malakar

Vice President of Product Management Alation

>> Good afternoon, data community, and welcome back to Databricks Data and AI Summit. My name is Savannah Peterson here in San Francisco, and I am very excited to be joined by my favorite new friend, Tibby. Thank you so much for joining us for Alation. It's great to have you on the show.

>> Thank you. It's my pleasure.

>> How has the day been for you? It's pumping in here. You mentioned It's a long day.

>> I'm loving it. It's a lot of action, a lot of customer interviews, and just learning about new innovations that customers are embarking on, so it's been wonderful so far.

>> Yeah, it has been wonderful so far. Just in case the audience isn't as familiar as you and I might be, give me the 30 second pitch for Alation.

>> Absolutely. Yeah, Alation helps organizations really find and understand and discover data and to be able to work with data and make it AI ready. We have around close to 600 customers, and 40% of the-

>> Congratulations....

>> Fortune 100 actually use Alation.

>> 40% of the Fortune 100, that stood out to me in my notes. That is very impressive. What is it about working with you, do you think, that attracts companies of that caliber?

>> Absolutely. So I would say there are few key factors. First is one of the challenges that I see customers facing today is the lack of trusted data, right? So they're working with various data silos and various clouds, et cetera, but then they were not able to easily find and discover data. And even when they find it, they're not able to understand the provenance and the lineage of data. And even when they understand that, they don't know whether to really trust the data or not, right? So the lack of trusted data is one of the key things that I hear from customers. The second one is sort of the current macroeconomic landscape, right? So today, budgets are not getting any bigger. A lot of pressure that customers have, CIOs have to do more with less. And in that climate, they're not looking for expensive offerings. They're looking for offerings that have a good customer value measurement system, or an ROI. So those are some of the challenges that customers face today. And when they use Alation, they are able to immediately derive value from the investment that they put in. And we always feel that it's not about just the technology, it's about people, process and technology. And that's where we feel like having the right combination helps us shine with various kinds of customers. It's enterprise customers or medium-scale customers, etc.

>> Well, you bring up a good point. The technology doesn't matter if the people aren't a part of the process.

>> That's right.

>> So it's an absolutely imperative bit. Looking at... Since you have such a wonderful snapshot, 40% of the top Fortune 100, what are some of the trends you've noticed? Are there any trends? Are different types of business verticals approaching this new adoption differently? What are you seeing?

>> I think some of the key trends that I'm noticing, first is I think the lack of, or the importance of data quality, right? As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of data floating around data silos, et cetera. There's the advent of AI and generative AI and everybody talks about it, but we feel that trusted AI cannot happen without trusted data, right?

>> That's a fact.

>> That is a fact.

>> I will make that a fact with you right here, yes.

>> Absolutely. And we hear that day in and day out from customers. If you have bad data that is feeding into the machine learning models, you're not going to get good results, doesn't matter how sophisticated the machine learning model is. So for us, we believe that one of the trends that we see is garbage in, garbage out.

>> Oh yeah, we've been hearing it on every big stage. We heard it at Dell. I'm sure... I feel like everyone in the AI mafia right now is saying that, but it's the truth. It's the truth. And I think it is important for moving forward because if you're putting, you won't be able to move forward.

>> That's right.

>> Period. So would you say when you're working with your customers, are they mostly at an experimentation phase of doing this, or are they at an implementation phase?

>> Yeah. I understand today, there are various stages of gen AI adoption, right? There is the awareness stage, there's the experimentation stage, standardization, optimizing, and transforming. Now, a lot of customers want to be in the later stages, but we definitely see a lot happening in the experimentation stage and people are trying out gen AI initiatives. And the reason for doing that is one is what I talked about earlier, which is the pressure of the budgets. The budgets are not getting any bigger, but also a desire to innovate and sustain a competitive advantage.

>> Right.

>> And I think that is what driving a lot of the GenAI initiatives, where they're aware of things, they want to run some experiments, and then get into the next stage of implementing that for smaller projects for one business unit.

>> What sort of early time to value early successes are you seeing across the portfolio of clients you work with?

>> Now today, we operate across 34 countries, multiple industries. We've seen a lot of success in financial services and healthcare insurance, et cetera. So we are seeing success across all industries. And I think one of the reasons we have been successful is our focus on customer value. So we had something called the data catalog value index, which is a dollar value of the benefit that you get from investing in Alation. So we don't focus on a feature list in some sheet, but we focus on what value the customers are getting from investing in a data catalog and a data governance offering, how they're embarking on a journey to make their data AI ready. So value measurement, measuring the ROI, and that really helps in our stakeholders present the value of this offering to their business stakeholders so that they can expand that to other areas in the company.

>> And I feel like that's really important for buy-in, for budget, for everything, right?

>> That's right.

>> You need to see those early POCs that can scale and actually have impact, not just the new shiny toy in the corner.

>> That is right. And what we tell customers is embark on a journey with clear success criteria, focus on one area, get some quick wins, talk about it, drive community engagement, drive policy conformance and adoption, and then go to the next level in terms of looking at bigger projects.

>> Yeah. Would be your... If I'm a company listening and I'm curious about working with you or maybe already a few steps down the path, what would be your advice to folks as they're coming to those conclusions about narrowing down those business use cases?

>> I would say the focus has to be on measurable progress. Determine what are the key business drivers in the business outcomes we want have. It should not be a technology-oriented conversation. What is it that you're trying to drive from a business outcome standpoint? Are you doing this for innovation? Are you doing this to gain competitive advantage? Are you doing that to improve your sales revenue or reduce customer experience costs? So have business outcomes and tie your value to those initiatives because we are just one portion of the software that you would use to bring about benefits in your organization.

>> Right. Absolutely. That's great advice. Can you share any customer examples, or at least industry examples? You've got some pretty big names on your website that you're working on.

>> Absolutely. We have customers like Cisco and Racetrack and Pfizer and a bunch of others. Personally, I'm very involved with Cisco. We just did a company event and we talked about the value, and it's been a great journey that they have embarked on. They started with a handful of users, or I would say a quarter or so. They have thousands of users coming in, and all they did was they included a search application and people went in and searched for assets because search and discovery is sort of the core value proposition we have, right? We are all about being able to easily find, understand and trust the data that you're looking at, right? And to make the data AI ready. So they have embarked on this journey. They started small, and now they're being used in multiple business units at Cisco. And what they really follow is a practice of active data governance, which is a combination of centralized and decentralized functions, right? So there are certain things, policies, et cetera that are centralized, but control is actually in the hands of the respective business units. They can go and define the domains and the templates for entering information, curating the data, et cetera. That way they feel empowered to drive their own future and own success.

>> And I love that you just brought that up. Why is that so important? Why is that different perhaps than how data was dealt within the past?

>> I think in the past, what has been happening is people focus more on the technology aspect of things. And our philosophy right from the beginning was, if the customer wins, then we as Alation will win. So we focus on customer success. And recently, we announced the data culture maturity assessment. They can go to the website and figure out where they are in a self-service manner in their data maturity journey, so that way they can understand what they need to do to get better at it.

>> Oh, that's great. And it's self-service. How long does that assessment survey take?

>> It should take about 10, 15 minutes. That's it.

>> Perfect. So you could literally figure out where you're off in your journey over your next cup of coffee.

>> Absolutely. And then we have a lot of expert services that we have pulled in, and we did a press announcement recently where we have customer engagement managers, we have other experts that could come in and help customers on their journey, basically tell them these are the things you could do to basically get more mature in your data culture maturity life cycle, whether it's improvement in data governance, it could be data leadership, it could be data literacy, all of those vectors.

>> All the data. All the data goodness. I love that. You mentioned the assessment survey. You also have had a couple other recent announcements. Can you tell us about those?

>> Absolutely. Yeah. So one of the core focus areas that we have recently embarked on is data quality, and we are very happy to announce that we're working with Snowflake with their Snowflake Horizon offering. And they recently introduced data metric functions, or DNFs, and customers can go in and define those metrics within Snowflake, either use the out of the box metrics or custom metrics and be able to surface those metrics in a less technical UI like Alation so that business users or analysts can look at what the data looks like and look at whether I can trust the data, is the data of good quality. So that's one integration offering we have done. We have also done the same with Databricks, with the data lakehouse monitoring offering. Similarly, you can define metrics. And with both of these offerings, they're using the open data quality framework that Alation has introduced. So it uses a set of open DQ APIs, feeds all those data quality metrics into Alation, and business users can see that in a single UI at the table level, what the data health is, and they can take action based on the insights about data quality that they get about those data objects.

>> What sorts of things do you think companies will do with the time they're going to have not wasted given this new tooling?

>> I think they can focus on innovation.

>> Yeah.

>> They don't have to focus on just being able to find and discover the data, and once they discover the data, I don't trust it, I don't understand the lineage of data. They don't have to worry about all of that. That is going to get much better, and then they can embark on the journey to become a more AI-ready company. As we said, if you don't focus on generative AI or AI techniques, you're going to be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind.

>> Absolutely. It almost gives me FOMO just thinking about it on the show right now. Taking off your relation hat for a second, what excites you most as a person, as a human about our AI future?

>> I think it's the ability to innovate. It's the ability to solve problems and use cases that we never even dreamt of before, right? Today when I see a car that doesn't have a driver, I'm like, what?

>> I saw a tractor that doesn't have a driver over there in the corner from Blue River. It was very cool.

>> So there was a time where people were scared. Maybe some people are still scared, but it actually opens up possibilities of use cases that we could not imagine of before. It allows them to focus on not on mundane stuff, like finding data or doing the data analytics, but how do I use AI to drive my productivity, to drive innovation, to drive competitive advantage? I think the possibilities are tremendous.

>> The possibilities are tremendous, and they give me a lot of hope. There's a lot of high positive and negative in our space right now, but I really do think we're going to be living longer, better lives with less time spent on the stuff we don't like to do. The most. Last question for you. I'm sure we're going to have you as a guest again here on theCUBE. Let's call it a year from now, what do you hope to be able to say that you can't say today?

>> I hope to be able to say that a lot of our customers have matured in their journey of GenAI adoption. Maybe they're in the standardization phase or transforming phase where they're able to use generative AI. Hopefully Alation is helping in that process, but in being able to innovate at a much faster pace and able to achieve competitive advantage.

>> I love it. That's a perfect sound bite to end on. Tibby, thank you so much for being here-

>> Thank you....

>> and taking time out of a very busy week for you.

>> Thank you. Pleasure.

>> Very busy two weeks for you here-

>> Absolutely....

>> at Moscone. And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful summer day. We're in San Francisco, California at Databricks Data and AI Summit. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Diby Malakar | Alation

>> Thank you. It's my pleasure.

>> How has the day been for you? It's pumping in here. You mentioned It's a long day.

>> I'm loving it. It's a lot of action, a lot of customer interviews, and just learning about new innovations that customers are embarking on, so it's been wonderful so far.

>> Yeah, it has been wonderful so far. Just in case the audience isn't as familiar as you and I might be, give me the 30 second pitch for Alation.

>> Congratulations....

>> Fortune 100 actually use Alation.

>> 40% of the Fortune 100, that stood out to me in my notes. That is very impressive. What is it about working with you, do you think, that attracts companies of that caliber?

>> Well, you bring up a good point. The technology doesn't matter if the people aren't a part of the process.

>> That's right.

>> That's a fact.

>> That is a fact.

>> I will make that a fact with you right here, yes.

>> That's right.

>> Period. So would you say when you're working with your customers, are they mostly at an experimentation phase of doing this, or are they at an implementation phase?

>> Right.

>> What sort of early time to value early successes are you seeing across the portfolio of clients you work with?

>> And I feel like that's really important for buy-in, for budget, for everything, right?

>> That's right.

>> You need to see those early POCs that can scale and actually have impact, not just the new shiny toy in the corner.

>> Right. Absolutely. That's great advice. Can you share any customer examples, or at least industry examples? You've got some pretty big names on your website that you're working on.

>> And I love that you just brought that up. Why is that so important? Why is that different perhaps than how data was dealt within the past?

>> Oh, that's great. And it's self-service. How long does that assessment survey take?

>> It should take about 10, 15 minutes. That's it.

>> Perfect. So you could literally figure out where you're off in your journey over your next cup of coffee.

>> All the data. All the data goodness. I love that. You mentioned the assessment survey. You also have had a couple other recent announcements. Can you tell us about those?

>> What sorts of things do you think companies will do with the time they're going to have not wasted given this new tooling?

>> I think they can focus on innovation.

>> Yeah.

>> Absolutely. It almost gives me FOMO just thinking about it on the show right now. Taking off your relation hat for a second, what excites you most as a person, as a human about our AI future?

>> I saw a tractor that doesn't have a driver over there in the corner from Blue River. It was very cool.

>> I love it. That's a perfect sound bite to end on. Tibby, thank you so much for being here-

>> Thank you....

>> and taking time out of a very busy week for you.

>> Thank you. Pleasure.

>> Very busy two weeks for you here-

>> Absolutely....