GigaOm Radar for Data Catalogsv4.0

1. Executive Summary

Data catalogs house the operational, technical, and business metadata used to describe, contextualize, and understand an organization’s data assets. These centralized hubs form the basis for data intelligence, critical for preserving data’s value over time while mitigating its risks. They’re the cornerstones for formalizing the rules, roles, and responsibilities organizations have in place for governing their data, guided by principles such as data modeling, data quality, data stewardship, data lifecycle management, metadata management, and more. With the retail-like shopping experiences many vendors provide, data catalogs are rapidly becoming the mechanism through which end users access data according to defined policies.

The importance of data catalogs is manifold. They provide a bridge for users of all types—specifically technical and business users—to comprehend the meaning of data and its relevance to business goals, such as meeting objectives for customer service or sales. Consequently, data catalogs couple the technical and business descriptions of data, including statistical data profiling information, hierarchies of terms, and business glossary definitions of data in a single place to clarify data’s utility. Data catalogs also function as hubs for elucidating, simplifying, and deconstructing the data intelligence pillars.

Through interactive views and detailed verbal and statistical information, data catalogs allow users to drill down into specifics of schema, data lineage, data quality scores and metrics, business rules, data retention policies, and more. Additionally, they serve as collaborative hubs with constructs for commenting, questioning, ranking, grading, and assessing specific datasets. These capabilities apply across different business domains, use cases, data types, and organizations. Consequently, these vital metadata repositories boost data literacy, broaden the adoption of data-driven processes, and propagate data culture more than any other infrastructural component does.

In addition to servicing each user persona within an organization—whether upper-level management, business users, IT teams, admins, data scientists, or data engineers—data catalogs facilitate collaborative data engagement. They have become increasingly critical to enterprises offering a centralized platform for making sense of and leveraging the expanding data landscape.

With each new implementation of data mesh, data products, data fabric, hybrid cloud, and multicloud deployment, the need to co-locate information about assets across these architectures grows. Data catalogs are quickly becoming control planes for each of these architectures and helping manage the mounting decentralization taking root across the data ecosystem.

This versatility effectively trumps even the individual features, automation points, and AI-driven enhancements that make data catalogs increasingly easy to use. Data catalogs have long provided the common platform on which the facets of data intelligence, as well as numerous enterprise disciplines and data sources, depend for the sustainable, long-term reuse of enterprise data.

Now, data catalogs are poised to become control planes for these resources, involving everything from governed data access to aspects of data pipeline management and more.

This marks our fourth year evaluating 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 Radar report examines 18 of the top data catalog solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. 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.