Alex Data Enterprise Platform

The Alex Data Enterprise Platform software (Alex) has at its heart a data catalog and business glossary. Supporting this are features for data profiling, data lineage and specific functionality in risk reporting and compliance. The company has developed over 80 connectors that enable it to read the metadata of a wide range of sources, from databases like Snowflake and Databricks to applications like SAP and more. The product can access data in public or private clouds or on-premise. Further connectors to specialist sources can be easily added by tailoring a connector framework that is provided.

The product can act as a “catalog of catalogs”, able to ingest data from products such as MSFT Purview, AWS Glue and GCP Google Catalog.

Fig 1 – Alex Enterprise data platform

Customer Quotes

“Alex is a great enterprise solution for complex environments.”
Large financial services industry customer

“Alex has positively impacted our Data Management practice as it is a one-stop shop to go in and find where things are. It is important to have a centralized place for easy accessibility without needing to ask, and be redirected to multiple users for the right data.”
Leading university in ANZ

Once the data catalog is populated, end users are presented with a data marketplace enabling them to visualise and search through their data landscape. Alex has a rich range of visual tools to help users navigate their data, from maps of data lineage through to knowledge graphs showing all manner of relationships between data e.g. looking at the sources of data or seeing where data leads downstream, enabling impact analysis. The knowledge graphs are enabled through the use of an underlying graph database (Neo4J) that is particularly good at enabling the display of such relationships. Users can group together logical collections of data and display these as business dataflows, for example seeing which applications deal with what types of data. The user interface seemed particularly intuitive and flexible, something reflected in the customer testimonials that I have examined. One energy customer pithily described it as “like getting a Bentley for the price of a Ford”.

Fig 2 – Knowledge graph

Alex employs AI algorithms to automatically tag and classify data. By analyzing the content, context, and patterns within datasets, documents, and other digital assets, AI assists in assigning appropriate tags and categories. AI-driven pattern matching identifies anomalies, correlations, and recurring trends within data. By applying machine learning algorithms for pattern matching, it reduces the need and risk of manual analysis. Alex Solutions is carefully evaluating the best use cases for generative AI, which it sees potential for in areas such as augmenting catalog descriptions, and possibly adding a natural language interface into the catalog. Future releases of the product are likely to see initial steps in this direction.

Although there are plenty of metadata catalogs and data governance solutions on the market, these have typically struggled to get a great deal of user engagement behind a few power users and data administrators. The unusually strong set of visual tools in this product should enable a broader set of business users to engage with the technology. Indeed, many of the customers of Alex have actually been conversions from customers who have tried to deploy some of the most popular solutions on the market from larger vendors.

A core differentiator is the ability of the software to do cross-application data lineage and impact analysis. Understanding how data flows between different technologies and systems remains a key cornerstone of data governance. The Alex platform intelligently harvests metadata from sources across the data landscape, enabling it to infer and visualize data flows comprehensively. It simplifies maintaining data lineage, understands dependencies, and ensures compliance with regulatory requirements like BCBS 239.

Bottom line

Alex is a powerful data governance and metadata catalog tool that has unusually strong data lineage features, a wide range of connectors to source data systems, and an especially rich set of graphical tools to enable the visualisation of complex data landscapes. It should be seriously considered by any customer wanting to improve the management of their corporate data.