GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Data Catalog Solutionsv4.0

1. Executive Summary

Data catalogs are foundational hubs for ingesting, classifying, curating, discovering, and acting on metadata about the entirety of an organization’s data assets—regardless of their location. The metadata management they enable is indispensable for propagating data intelligence, which strategically increases data’s value as a longstanding enterprise asset while reducing the risk of its exposure or loss. Consequently, data catalogs provide an enterprise nexus for formalizing the roles, responsibilities, and rules for preserving data’s value over the long term.

Data catalogs do this primarily by centralizing, organizing, and making discoverable the business, technical, and operational metadata that describes an organization’s data. This metadata management is the cornerstone of other data intelligence mainstays, such as data modeling, lifecycle management, data quality, and data stewardship. It underlies critical corollaries such as data privacy, regulatory compliance, data reliability, and certain facets of data security. Each of these domains is integral to ensuring consistency in establishing data’s meaning, its use according to certified business rules, its accuracy, and, ultimately, its trustworthiness. As such, data catalogs directly uphold any investment in data-centric processes at an enterprise scale.

Business Imperative
The business imperatives for data catalogs are compelling. The most noteworthy is likely their capability to raise the value of data as an enterprise asset and markedly increase an organization’s ability to employ it as such. From enhancing the overall data literacy of an organization to fostering and nurturing its data culture, data catalogs make users much more knowledgeable, savvy, and accomplished at leveraging data to achieve business objectives. They’re also essential for mitigating the proliferation of data silos, as they supply an abundance of mechanisms to foster collaboration within and across business units, data owners, subject matter experts, and nontechnical users.

Data catalogs serve as the juncture of many facets of data intelligence and data management as a whole, so this market is evolving more swiftly than others within the data ecosystem. Already, it’s commonplace for vendors to enable data access through data marketplaces that are similar to those of retail vendors like Amazon. Most solutions have embraced the generative AI movement and rely on foundation models for everything from copilots to summaries of annotations and articles about data sources. Many are incorporating aspects of machine learning (ML) model registries to assist data scientists. These developments are projected to continue apace for the near future.

The vendors themselves encompass a gamut of styles and approaches. There are upstarts that specialize in numerous fields, coupling their cataloging modules with those for data management as a whole, data observability, and data governance. There are also established players with pioneering efforts in data cataloging and metadata management.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a data catalog solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a data catalog solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 5 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a data catalog solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for data catalog are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Data Catalogs

This is the fourth year that GigaOm has reported on the data catalog space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective data catalog solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading data catalog offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.