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. In that climate, they’re not looking for expensive offerings … when they use Alation, they are able to immediately derive value from the investment that they put in.”

Malakar spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson at the Data + AI Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of creating a data catalog for large language models and Alation’s new market collaborations. (* Disclosure below.)

Data catalog tools are fueling AI development

Alation is partnering with Snowflake Inc. on Snowflake Horizon, a built-in governance layer, and on Databricks Inc.’s data lakehouse monitoring offering to provide a more straightforward and seamless experience for the user.

“With both of these offerings, [Snowflake and Databricks are] using the open data quality framework that Alation has introduced,” Malakar said. “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.”

Companies should focus on the business outcomes, not the technology itself, according to Malakar. Alation has created a data-culture maturity assessment that business leaders can take to understand where they are in their AI journey.

“AI cannot happen without trusted data,” Malakar said. “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.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Data + AI Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE