Ataccama

Last Updated: 3rd March 2021
Analyst Coverage: Philip Howard and Daniel Howard

Ataccama first came to market with its eponymous product, in 2008. This was a data quality tool. Not long afterwards it released DQ Analyzer, which is a free data profiling tool. More recently, it has built upon this expertise to develop Ataccama ONE, which provides a broad-based data management and governance platform.

The company has its headquarters in Toronto with additional offices in the United States, London, Paris, Prague, Valencia, Sofia, and Sydney. The company does not focus on any particular vertical but has a significant presence in financial services, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, the public sector, telecommunications, and retail. It has a significant partnership programme, which includes technology partners such as Collibra, Cloudera, Teradata, and Information Builders (which OEMs Ataccama technology) as well as systems integrators and value-added resellers. The company offers comprehensive consulting, support, and other services.

Company Info

Headquarters: 140 Broadway 46th Floor, New York City, NY 10005
Telephone: +1 (212) 208 1463

Ataccama ONE

Last Updated: 3rd March 2021

What is it?

Fig 01 - The components of Ataccama ONE

Ataccama ONE encompasses data integration, data cataloguing, data profiling and data quality, and both reference and master data management. Specific elements of each of these is illustrated in Figure 1. Note that there is no explicit data governance product or module though various relevant data governance capabilities are spread across the environment. It is worth commenting that all these capabilities have been developed in-house and all of them share metadata, which makes a pleasant change compared to offerings from some other vendors that consist of products that were not initially designed to work together. There is also a single engine underpinning everything, with an extension for big data processing. The only exception to this rule is for data lineage, for which Ataccama embeds the Manta Unified Lineage Platform. Manta is a leading provider of specialist data lineage solutions.

Ataccama ONE is available to run on all the major cloud platforms (the product supports implementations using Kubernetes and Docker containers) and can be provided as a fully managed service if required. On-premises and hybrid deployments are also supported.

Customer Quotes

“Because we had very high performance expectations, Ataccama was a clear winner.”
Miroslav Umlauf, Data Management Director at Avast

“The cost vs business value is significantly better than competitors and the power of the AI engine and capabilities is industry leading.”
Head of Data in the Finance Industry

What does it do?

Fig 02 - The Ataccama ONE Knowledge Catalog

The other notable result of the deep integration provided by Ataccama ONE is that the various user interfaces that are provided, which are targeted at different personas, are consistent across all of the platform’s capabilities. As illustrated in Figure 2, this is visually appealing. More notably, this screenshot shows the forthcoming release (2.0) of Ataccama ONE, in which the company is introducing its Knowledge Catalog as a superset of both its Data Catalog and Business Glossary.

More generally, the company describes its platform as “self-driving”, by which it means that it has built significant levels of machine learning and AI into Ataccama ONE. As an example, the data catalogue, which includes full text search and supports natural language processing, will learn from past experience of relevant searches, and come up with notifications if it detects an anomaly or other alert-worthy information, such as “looks like a table with GDPR content”. While on this topic, it is worth noting the company’s support for data masking (both static and dynamic), which includes consistent masking and the ability to preserve referential integrity, amongst other algorithms. In addition, consent management is provided within the MDM module. Unfortunately, there are no features to support the automation of data subject access requests (DSARs). While the company is by no means unique in building machine learning into its platform we particularly like the fact that it has also built explanations of its AI into the offering. We have not seen this level of explainability from other vendors.

Other features of note include the fact that the IDE is Eclipse-based, there is support for REST APIs and, where relevant, jobs can run natively on Spark, Databricks and so on, so that transformations can either be supported in ETL or ELT mode. Beyond this, the company provides a Reference Data Management module, with approval-based workflow capabilities and governance workflows built in to manage and distribute reference data. Data quality rules can be exposed as a web service.

Why should you care?

Ataccama ONE is a comprehensive platform for establishing and managing (cloud-based) analytic environments. It has all the fundamental requirements that one could ask for, though from a marketing perspective it might be advantageous to the company if it called out data governance as a module in its own right. That said, spreading governance capabilities across the environment makes a lot of sense so this is a marketing argument rather than a technical one.

Ataccama ONE has the distinct advantage of being a natively integrated, single engine solution, as opposed to a bunch of individual modules that have been stitched together. This is not only relevant when it comes to the performance and scalability of the platform but also to the end-user interface, which is consistent – by persona – across the environment. The product’s “self-driving” approach to automation is also significant and perhaps ahead of some of its competitors. That said, all major market players are investing into AI and automation capabilities, and one area where Ataccama stands out is in its explainability.

The Bottom Line

Ataccama, while by no means one of the biggest names in this space, is a significant contender with a proven track record. It is certainly worth serious consideration as a potential supplier.

DQ Analyzer

Last Updated: 22nd January 2013

What it does

Ataccama's data profiling tool is DQ Analyzer (version 8) and it is available as a free download from the company's website. This is compelling for users that want to demonstrate to their organisations that they really have a data quality problem but who don't believe it. Of course the purpose of making this available for free is to entice those users to subsequently license the company's DQ Center, as well as other products, in order to resolve the problems identified by DQ Analyzer.

Ataccama DQ Analyzer as a pure-play profiling tool is decent without being exceptional. On the other hand, given that it is free, it is sensational value for money.

Markets and channels

While it isn't fussy about it, Ataccama tends to focus on financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, government and the public sector. Its customers include both major institutions and small or medium-sized businesses. Ataccama's software is resold by iWay (a division of Information Builders) and iWay has embedded both DQ Center and Master Data Center into its enterprise service bus.

Users

Ataccama has over 100 customers from large multi-national corporations to mid-sized businesses in a variety of industries including Allianz, a number of medium sized banks and insurance companies, Orange, Telefonica and T-Mobile.

Technology

The product is Windows-based and supports JDBC for database access and there is also a text file reader though no comparable facility for Microsoft Excel. There is a special version of DQ Analyzer available for use with Teradata (with which Ataccama is a partner).

As a product DQ Analyzer is clearly in the profiling and not the discovery camp. This is somewhat surprising given that Ataccama markets Master Data Center as an MDM offering: one would expect that features such as the ability to identify matching keys would be a useful ability in support of MDM. Also noteworthy is that DQ Analyzer only provides statistical analysis of your data. Unlike other profiling products it has no ability to monitor data quality on an on-going basis. This is provided through a separate product called DQ Dashboard, which is chargeable. One feature of the product suite that is worth special mention is DQ Issue Tracker, which supports data governance (by tracking your remediation efforts) and is unique in the marketplace.

Services

Apart from training, Ataccama offers data quality consulting, master data management services and information governance. Note that the emphasis is on the company's broader solution set rather than data profiling or discovery per se.