Simplifying Data Governance Across the Lakehouse: Why We're Investing in Alation

Databricks Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Alation, the enterprise data intelligence platform. Alation’s platform complements the Databricks Lakehouse architecture by extending the data discovery, governance and catalog capabilities built into Databricks and Unity Catalog - a unified governance solution for all data and AI assets - across other data sources within an enterprise. Through closer integration between Alation and Databricks, customers will be able to extend the capabilities of their lakehouse into more systems - letting them answer bigger, more impactful questions with their data than ever before.

We regularly hear from customers and partners about their challenges in making data secure, reliable, sharable and trustworthy. As data-driven decision making becomes a central part to every team and business function, developing an effective data governance strategy - across growing data volumes and data types - has become a key investment focus for data leaders. We also know that data governance, including enabling data discoverability and collaboration across teams, is critical to successful lakehouse adoption.

For these reasons, we’ve been making significant investments in improving governance on the Databricks Lakehouse - including building Unity Catalog, and deepening our integrations with leading enterprise data governance and security platforms like Alation.

This strategic investment builds upon our longstanding relationship with Alation and deepens the partnership for the benefit of our many joint customers. As a result, Databricks and Alation customers will benefit from tighter integrations between Alation and Databricks Unity Catalog and the Lakehouse Platform as both companies deepen our joint go-to-market initiatives. Alation’s upcoming support for Partner Connect will make it easy for Databricks customers looking for a data intelligence solution to quickly find and enable Alation’s cloud-native offering.

Now more than ever, an organization’s data is one of its most critical assets. With Alation and Databricks, data teams have a stronger understanding of the trusted data in their lakehouse that can be used to drive business value through data, analytics and AI/ML.