Collibra

Last Updated: 7th December 2023
Analyst Coverage: Andy Hayler and Philip Howard

Collibra is a small but high growth Data Governance software company. Its research and development is done in Europe, but deploys most of its sales and marketing activities through its US headquarters in New York (60% of the customers are US based).

The company’s technology originally derived from research into semantics, which was first commercialised in 2008.

The company has grown to over a thousand employees with over 700 enterprise customers across the globe and now has offices from Canada to Australia. The company has attracted a lot of capital investment, with the last financing round valuing the company at $5.25 billion. Customers include Adobe, Credit Suisse, Equifax, and Heineken.

Collibra specialises in data governance software and supporting data stewardship for structured data. As such it is the only vendor that specifically focuses on this market to the exclusion of other capabilities. Its solutions—Data Stewardship Manager, Business Glossary, Reference Data Accelerator and the Data Governance Center (which combines the other three)—should be regarded as complementary to traditional suppliers of data quality and master data management software.

Company Info

Headquarters: 61 Broadway, 31st Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
Telephone: +1 646 893 3042

Collibra data intelligence solution

Last Updated: 23rd November 2023
Mutable Award: Platinum 2023

What is it?

Figure 1 – Overview to Collibra

Collibra offers a comprehensive data governance solution that has expanded in scope over the years, and it now prefers the term “data intelligence solution”. Enterprises have a broad range of data assets, located on-premise and in public and private clouds, in a wide variety of applications and data sources. They need to control that range of data assets and ensure that their data is reliable, unambiguous, and of high quality. Collibra offers a full-function data governance solution that can be tailored to various categories of business users, such as data stewards, data scientists, and data owners. The solution provides both a business glossary and technical data catalog along with both business and technical lineage, providing business context to technical metadata. This approach helps ensure collaboration between both business and technical users.

Customer Quotes

“Collibra has played an important role in our journey to build data transparency within our organization. It helps our users connect the dots and support our desired self-service model, eliminating the need for a middleman and allowing them to focus on their real work.”
Ashish Haruray, Senior Center of Excellence Lead, Data Governance, AXA XL

“One of the biggest benefits of Collibra has been to build a single and centralized foundation for overseeing our invaluable data assets. People in the business can now stop wasting time running around going to meetings,
making phone calls, or sending emails to chase information. Instead, they go straight to Collibra for the information they need.”
Pavel Ermakov, Head of Data Excellence, Daiichi Sankyo Europe

“Collibra is the only data governance platform in Froedtert. The platform is the only place where everyone can find out about the various data elements we have across the organization.
In terms of data literacy and increasing the data acumen providing that trust and credibility, Collibra is an integral part of our data strategy.”
Fahad Bijle, Director, Enterprise Analytics and Data Strategy at F&MCW

What does it do?

At its heart it is a data catalog and business glossary that documents the data assets of an organisation. Data can be classified and profiled, and business ownership can be assigned to the various data assets. Policies can be defined and enforced, so for example, workflow can be defined to check the authorisation of changes to a particular business hierarchy. Collibra has visual tools to assist users in navigating their data landscape, including a comprehensive data lineage solution that tracks the flow of data and can be used for impact analysis. This is the company’s own intellectual property, so they no longer rely, as they once did, on a partnership with a third party data lineage specialist. There is also a “knowledge graph” to help visualise the technical and business connections between data.

There is a search capability to allow data assets to be discovered. Collibra has a reputation for having an interface that is digestible by business users, and this will go further in the future versions with a comprehensive set of changes, including the ability to tailor the interface to specific data assets as well as different business roles. Collibra extends its capability to cover data access and security and overlaps to a degree with special security governance products.

The product uses artificial intelligence in several ways, some of which will be more visible in the upcoming releases, for example with the generation of content for data asset descriptions. This is already used in suggesting possible data duplication. The vendor (correctly) believes that although generative AI can be very productive, it still needs human review for generated content, as AI content can sometimes be overly imaginative (the so-called “hallucination” problem inherent in large language models),

Collibra has extensive partnerships, so for example, Collibra can ingest metadata from platforms such as Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure and SAP. Interestingly, there is what seems to be a quite productive partnership with SAP despite that vendor notionally having its own data governance offering. Additional bridges exist to products like Databricks and Snowflake, with over a hundred connectors provided. Collibra is planning integration to productivity tools like Slack and Teams also, enabling for example alerts in Collibra to be visible in Slack. Collibra has a robust data quality application which can be used standalone or as part of the overall data intelligence platform, and they continue to further integrate these experiences. For example, data quality scores will be made visible within the data catalog when a data asset is being viewed.

Why should you care?

Collibra is the current market leader in data governance and a pioneer in the space. It offers a fully functional data catalog and business glossary with powerful search and discovery tools, visuals and knowledge graphs. The vendor continues to attract investment, and so is well positioned to continue to plough money into research and development to continue to improve its product. The scope of the product has increased in recent years as it has developed its own data lineage and data quality capabilities, which at one time it used to rely on partners to provide. This is a natural development in a market that is beginning to mature, with customers often seeking broader solutions to their data management issues. The vendor needs to ensure that the acquisitions that it has made are smoothly integrated within the overall user interface and customer experience, and it is clearly investing in this.

The Bottom Line

Collibra is one of the market leaders in data governance and did a great deal to popularise this field. The vendor continues to expand its customer base and invest in new and improved product areas. As such it is a natural product to be considered for enterprise data governance needs.

Mutable Award: Platinum 2023