Alation and Salesforce partner on data governance for Data Cloud

Data intelligence platform vendor Alation has partnered with Salesforce to deliver trusted, governed data across the enterprise.

It will do this, it said, with bidirectional integration between its platform and Salesforce’s to seamlessly delivers data governance and end-to-end lineage within Salesforce Data Cloud. This enables companies to directly access key metadata (tags, governance policies, and data quality indicators) from over 100 data sources in Data Cloud, it said.

The two companies presented a session on data governance in Data Cloud at Dreamforce this week, to highlight the future of enterprise data management and governance.

“Salesforce is seeing a future of applications being delivered primarily in an agentic manner,” said Satyen Sangani, co-founder and CEO of Alation, in an interview, referring to the use of software agents such as AI-powered chatbots as the main interface.

While it’s still early days, he pointed out that “[the agents] basically run off of data, and the quality of data that you have is fundamental to the quality of the output of the model. And that not only is the data on which the model is trained, the seed data, but it also extends to any of the prompts you send to the models, and to the information and context you send to the models in order to allow them to send the best possible response.”

Alation has not only developed a connector to Salesforce Data Cloud, he said, it is “deepening that connectivity over time as they develop and deliver new capabilities, which they’re doing quite rapidly. Additional to that, we are also allowing the metadata inside of Alation to be read into these agents.”

The metadata, he said, will provide the AI agents with necessary context to improve their outputs.

“You just get a higher quality response because they were able to integrate the information that exists inside of a relationship,” he said.

Alation also uses its own AI, dubbed Allie, to provide AI-assisted curation and intelligent search within Data Cloud, and to assist it in developing connectors to other data sources. When it imports the physical representation of a dataset, it also pulls in additional information such as logs and documentation to describe and contextualize the data.

“We look at the entire landscape of information that an enterprise has,” Sangani said. “As we do that, we’re learning constantly, and that learning allows us to take what otherwise a standard LLM might not know, and then season it with information that is specific to that enterprise so that we can translate their technical speak into something that is understandable.” That work takes a lot of machine learning and AI to accomplish.

Alation also works with structured and semi-structured data, as well as some unstructured data living inside of file stores, Sangani said, and will leverage what metadata it can find, but it does not, for example, go into video files and generate metadata about their contents.

While Alation offers the governance for the data within Data Cloud, for its part, Sangani said, “I think Salesforce recognizes that they need an ecosystem to make Data Cloud successful. Broadly defined, if you’re going to try to build a data storage environment, people and enterprises are going to need to trust the information inside of that environment.”

To accomplish that, Salesforce has created the Salesforce Data Governance Alliance, which Alation said is a group of partners Salesforce trusts to govern the data within Data Cloud. Alation is a founding member, along with Collibra.