Solutions Review’s Vendors to Know in Metadata Management and Data Cataloging, 2021

Solutions Review’s annual Vendors to Know in Metadata Management Solutions provides the details on the most critical solution providers in the space.

The editors at Solutions Review continually research the most prominent and influential metadata management vendors to assist buyers in search of the tools befitting the needs of their organization. Choosing the right vendor and solution can be a complicated process; it requires constant market research and often comes down to more than just the solution and its technical capabilities. To make your search a little easier, we listed the vendors to know in metadata management tools.

Note: Companies are listed in alphabetical order.

Vendors to Know in Metadata Management Tools, 2021

Alation

Alation offers a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions including data search and discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. The product features a Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces. Alation also profiles data and monitors usage to ensure that users have accurate insight into data accuracy. The platform provides insight into how users are creating and sharing information from raw data as well.

Alex Solutions

Alex Solutions is a technology agnostic unified enterprise data catalog. It features a business glossary that enables users to define and maintain key business terms and link them to physical data assets, processes, and outputs. Policy-driven data quality combines data lineage with data profiling and machine learning-based intelligent tagging. Alex also offers intelligent tagging that helps users add business context to physical data assets. Deployment and integration are simple, and the product’s user interface is friendly to business users.

ASG Technologies

ASG Technologies offers a data intelligence platform that can discover data from more than 220 traditional and big data sources. The tool features automated data tagging by pattern matching, integration of reference data, and enriched metrics. Automated business linage allows users to better understand their data, and governance capabilities include those for tracing data in the data lake and traditional sources. ASG’s EDI product offers an impressive capabilities portfolio, with reference customers touting the vendor’s support for a variety of business use cases.

Collibra

Collibra’s Data Dictionary documents an organization’s technical metadata and how it is used. It describes the structure of a piece of data, its relationship to other data, and its origin, format, and use. The solution serves as a searchable repository for users who need to understand how and where data is stored and how it can be used. Users can also document roles and responsibilities and utilize workflows to define and map data. Collibra is unique because the product was built with business end-users in mind.

data.world

data.world offers a cloud-native enterprise data catalog that provides complete context so users can understand their data, regardless of where it resides. This includes metadata, dashboards, analysis, code, docs, project management, and social media collaboration capabilities. The product automatically builds a connected web of data and insights so users can explore relationships as well, and provides recommendations on related assets to improve analysis. data.world is unique due to its continuous release cycle.

erwin

erwin offers a unified software platform for combining data governance, enterprise architecture, business process, and data modeling. The product is delivered as a managed service that allows users to discover and harvest data, as well as structure and deploy data sources by connecting physical metadata to specific business terms and definitions. erwin imports metadata from data integration tools, as well as cloud-based platforms, and can evaluate complex lineages across systems and use cases.

IBM

IBM’s InfoSphere Information Server features a metadata repository that stores metadata from suite tools and external tools and databases and enables sharing among them. Users can import metadata into the repository from multiple sources, export metadata by various methods, and transfer metadata between design, test, and production repositories. IBM Watson Catalog provides AI-assisted self-service discovery of data, machine learning models and more. The product lets users access, curate, categorize and share data, knowledge assets and their relationships, regardless of where the data resides.

Infogix

Infogix offers a suite of integrated data governance capabilities that include business glossaries, data cataloging, data lineage, and metadata management. The tool also provides customizable dashboards and zero-code workflows that adapt as each organizational data capability matures. Reference customers use Infogix for data governance and for risk, compliance and data value management. The product is also flexible and easy to use, and supports smaller data analysis jobs as well.

Informatica

Informatica Metadata Management allows enterprises to tap into four major categories of data, including technical, database schemas, mappings and code, business (glossary terms, governance processes), operational and infrastructure (run-time stats and time stamps), and usage (user ratings and comments). Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is a machine learning-based data catalog that lets you classify and organize data assets across any environment. The product also provides a metadata system of record for the enterprise.

MANTA

MANTA offers a unified data lineage platform that maps all information flows to provide a complete overview of your data pipeline. The product reveals the data’s origins and its journey through all data processing systems to you. MANTA automatically updates lineage whenever necessary and shows data flows in a way that is user-friendly, clear, and understandable. The solution was designed to be integrated into any data management ecosystem as well.

Octopai

Octopai is a centralized, cross-platform metadata management automation solution that enables data and analytics teams to discover and govern shared metadata. The product does metadata scanning by automatically gathering it from ETL, databases and reporting tools. Metadata is stored and managed in a central repository, and a smart engine using hundreds of crawlers searches all metadata and presents results quickly. Octopai is best used for use cases in business intelligence, governance, and data cataloging.

Oracle

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management is a metadata management platform that can harvest and catalog metadata from any provider. The product also touts advanced algorithms that stitch together metadata assets from each of the providers. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Catalog is a metadata management service that helps organizations find and govern data using an organized inventory of data assets. The product features a modern, intuitive user interface that includes a simple dashboard, search-and-browse capabilities, recommended actions, and shortcuts.

OvalEdge

OvalEdge offers an on-prem data catalog and governance toolset that crawls databases, data lakes and back-end systems to create a smart catalog of the information. The product provides a discovery platform that both novice and experienced analysts can use to discover data quickly. OvalEdge includes built-in governance tools that help define a standard business glossary, data assets, PIIs and limits access by various roles. It also organizes data automatically via machine learning and advanced algorithms.

SAP

SAP offers its metadata management capabilities via SAP PowerDesigner, SAP Information Steward, and SAP Data Intelligence. SAP utilizes metadata integration for multiple DBMS platforms, across the SAP ecosystem, with available integrators for BI platforms, data modeling solutions, and other data integration software. SAP Data Intelligence is an AI-powered data management solution that includes data orchestration, machine learning, and metadata management.

Smartlogic

Semaphore is an enterprise-grade semantic platform that allows organizations to enrich data, extract facts, and harmonize information sources. The product features a model-driven, rule-based approach that enhances the capabilities of existing technologies. Smartlogic allows users to drive self-service delivery as well as move enterprise search from keyword to semantic to find data related to a query. Smartlogic is known for its excellent modeling, metadata transformation and creation capabilities.

Zaloni

Zaloni Arena operationalizes data along the entire pipeline, from data source to consumer. The product automates repeatable data management tasks and processes and provides central management of all enterprise data sources whether on-prem, cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid. Zaloni is compatible with all major Hadoop distributions, most data processing engines, and applicable deployment models.