Data governance platforms – once considered a back-office functional tool – have emerged as a strategic imperative for any business looking to harness the power of their data for advanced analytics and actionable insights. As businesses face increased pressure for both enhanced data usability and mounting expectations from stakeholders and regulators for enhanced data integrity, the right data governance platform can make all the difference. Selecting the right data governance platform for your business isn’t as simple as it may sound – it’s critical that your data governance platform aligns to the overarching goals and business processes within the organization. Below, we’re covering the leading modern data governance platforms and their relative strengths and weaknesses.  

Established Data Governance Platform Solution Providers 

IBM 

IBM leverages a robust, AI-driven approach to data governance integrating real-time data quality monitoring, knowledge graphs, and AI governance into a hybrid cloud architecture. Data governance products are integrated through the IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) as cloud-native solutions supporting hybrid, multicloud data landscape delivery. With the IBM Knowledge Catalog (IKC) and watsonx, the IBM platform enables data governance at scale, allowing businesses to enable comprehensive governance across many types of data and requirements.  

That said, the comprehensive capabilities offered by IBM come at a price – the complexity of integrating with other systems and licensing costs can create challenges for organizations seeking a simpler or more basic solution. Additionally, as IBM has enabled many of its capabilities through acquisition, data governance is spread through many different products, requiring separate licensing and integration efforts. The scale and complexity of IBM’s data governance solution often require skilled IT professionals, making it a less advantageous solution for small or midsize enterprises.  

Informatica 

Informatica is well known in data management with the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) leveraging AI to automative governance flows. The cloud-native solution supports multicloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Oracle, and Google Cloud. Informatica’s history in the data governance space is a clear strength for the platform, ensuring that the business is staying on top of trends and driving innovation for the market. The launch of CLAIRE GPT and AI have enabled further innovative capabilities by allowing users to perform and automate data management tasks more effectively. Informatica’s deep history in the space has also afforded a robust product ecosystem of partners and strategic partnerships with major players, such as Microsoft.  

As Informatic has pursued a cloud-only approach, support for businesses seeking on-prem or hybrid models will be limited. Further complicating an implementation of IDMC is the lack of self-service tools or migration resources – the migration to IDMC requires a skilled partner or professional services advisor to execute appropriately, incurring additional time and costs. Lastly, the pricing model offered by Informatica requires customers to forecast annual usage, which can create budget constraints and drive up the total cost of ownership over time.  

Collibra 

Collibra’s offers two data governance platforms – the Collibra Data Intelligence Platform managed in the cloud environment available on AWS and Google Cloud, and the Collibra Data Quality & Observability solutions, currently available in on-prem environments only. Collibra’s customer base tends to skew towards financial services, healthcare, and retail, with clients across North America and Europe. Collibra’s recent growth portends favorable future expansion as the businesses has grown both in size and partnerships over recent years, including integrations with over 100 different data environments and a recently-announced partnership to support SAP ecosystems. Collibra’s tools offer robust end-to-end governance capabilities focused on both technical and non-technical users.  

Collibra leverages a somewhat modular approach to data governance, which can increase the total cost as businesses must acquire and integrate additional requirements for hardware and software to enable the full spectrum of data governance capabilities. Workflow management and maintenance also can be challenge for certain prospective customers as customized workflows require programming skills, as well as testing needs, thus incurring additional costs and resources. Collibra’s approach to release documentation has also frustrated customers as the push for monthly release updates often lack appropriate documentation or guidance for what’s changed or been added.  

Emerging Data Governance Platform Solution Providers 

Alation 

Alation offers both on-prem and cloud-based products via the Alation Data Intelligence Platform with the majority of customers in the North America and based in the financial services, healthcare, and public sectors as of today. Alation’s history as a data catalog vendor has enabled a robust amount of connectors to different data sources, tools, and APIs. The business’s focus on a user-friendly, accessible, and easy-to-implement solution is especially appealing for non-technical users as the out-of-the-box functionality allows for smooth customization to various data sources. Similarly, Alation has a demonstrated focus on customer service and support with an array of tools to help businesses adopt the tools effective and connect with other users to share ideas.  

Alation lags behind some of its peers in functionality as the tool lacks native data quality, observability, and master data management functions – meaning that businesses would have to secure separate solutions to integrate with Alation for these needs. Outside of those functions, Alation also lacks some of the advanced capabilities other tools provide, such as advanced profiling and/or rule creation with GenAI/NLP. Furthermore, Alation’s cloud deployment is primarily AWS-focused, limiting options for businesses in other cloud environments.  

Atlan 

Atlan’s self-named Atlan data governance platform focuses on AI-powered automation and intuitive metadata management to simplify the data governance process for businesses. The business has a strong track record of growth and focus to the customer experience. The customer experience team at Atlan is among the largest teams in the organization offering a robust approach to learning, development, and improvement through its Atlan University. Atlan has also employed an innovation-driven approach to the platform with a focus on AI-driven solutions and open metadata lakehouse infrastructure to enable increases in scale and/or diversity of data.  

While Atlan’s has a tremendous focus on customer experience, the ease of implementation and scalability of the solution are two areas where Atlan may fall behind their peers. Organizations with limited technical resources or have run into challenges requiring external expertise in implementation. However, the business continues to grow, and it remains to be seen how they will address the growing volume, scale, and complexity of data sets for larger enterprises.  

data.world 

data.world is seeking to carve out its own niche of data governance platforms with a focus to integrating GenAI applications. AI-driven search, query summarization, and metadata automation are just a few of the features data.world employs to drive enhanced usability and productivity for non-technical teams. While a large portion of data.world customers are in banking, insurance, and consumer products, the business has robust goals to spread across a wide range of industries. The platform also provides significant customization capabilities with a flexible user interface that allows businesses to meet specific needs across organizations and domains. The user-centric approach expands across the business as the data.world user community offers a collaborative environment for users to share ideas and engage with one another.  

The effort for integrating the platform with on-prem and cloud resources can be challenging and often requires additional resources and expertise. Customers have also cited a lack of confidence in the long-term innovation strategy for the business and how they will develop and roll out enhanced features in the future.  

Niche Data Governance Platform Solution Providers 

Ab Initio 

Ab Initio offers data governance capabilities through its metadata hub module – a part of its broader Enterprise Data Platform – a tool that provides functionality to manage data across the data life cycle management. Primarily focused in banking, insurance, telecom, and healthcare, Ab Initio has a wide and robust range of capabilities across the entire Enterprise Data Platform, enabling businesses to scale, implement, and integrate components on an as-needed basis. Ab Initio’s experience in complex, large, and highly regulated industries further enables robust audit and compliance support, end-to-end lineage tracking, and high-performance data processing.  

The scale and complexity of Ab Initio’s platform brings with it a host of potential challenges for businesses. Average pricing and licensing costs, for example, are higher than competitors as many features are treated as add-ons. Furthermore, implementation and integration complexity are often challenge as Ab Initio’s infrastructure and deployment require significant IT effort to maintain. Lastly, as Ab Initio started as an on-prem platform, the cloud offerings are somewhat limited compared to peers.  

Alex Solutions 

The Alex Solutions data governance platform includes a data hub, intelligent scanners, enterprise reporting and analytics, a data lineage service, and Alex AI Guru with an emphasis on automation. Based out of Australia, Alex Solutions serves a wide range of customers with a strong presence in APAC and growing customer base in North America. Alex Solutions continues to focus efforts and investments in real-time data activation orchestration and Gen AI as a means for improvement data governance and management. The business has also carved out distinction for itself in compliance and risk management as the platform provides real-time lineage of data flow, historical analytics, anomaly detection, and certifications of compliance.  

Alex Solutions is currently making strident efforts to expand into North America and Europe but rapid growth and demand has put pressures on the organization to scale with their clients. Outside of that, customers have also cited task management as an area of improvement fo the Alex Solutions platform.  

OvalEdge 

OvalEdge, headquartered in the United States, focuses primarily on the mid-size market with a straightforward platform that enables clients to catalog datasets, define business glossaries, trace data lineage, monitor quality, enforce data access policies, and monitor and enforce privacy and compliance policies. OvalEdge has focused efforts on a simplistic tool with an easy-to-use interface and focus on customer service. The simple tool is also among the least costly of any on the market.  

OvalEdge’s price and ease come at a cost, however, as the functionality is limited compared to other products on the market. Customers have also reported a lack of understanding on product development and release schedules.  

How Do You Decide Which Data Governance Platform is Right for Your Business?  

These are just a sampling of the wide range of data governance platforms available on the market. Selecting the right tool for your business requires a deep understanding of your business and industry, strategic objectives, and technical resources and capabilities. Before selecting a tool, it’s critical to first assess your business processes and operations around data governance. Even the best tool can fall flat when not aligned or customized to meet the organizational needs and processes.   

We’ve helped organizations across the consumer products, retail, and life sciences industries select, implement, integrate, and scale data governance platforms to drive innovation, new and advanced capabilities, and transformation. If you’d like to learn more about how we’ve helped businesses just like yours, please reach out to us today.