Collibra

Last Updated: 12th November 2020
Analyst Coverage: 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.

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: New York, USA
Telephone: +1 347 491 38 28

Data Governance Center

Last Updated: 24th February 2014

What it does

According to Wikipedia, data governance is “a set of processes that ensures that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. Data governance ensures that data can be trusted and that people can be made accountable for any adverse event that happens because of low data quality. It is about putting people in charge of fixing and preventing issues with data so that the enterprise can become more efficient.” Collibra believes that in order to successfully implement data governance initiatives you have to automate as much of this set of processes as possible. Bloor Research completely agrees. It is important to distinguish this approach from that of most data quality vendors, which will provide information to data stewards but not provide the degree of automation available from Collibra.

The other most notable point about Collibra’s approach is that it very focused on use within the business as opposed to a purely technical approach. This is important because data governance is essentially a business issue.

Markets and channels

Collibra uses both direct sales and marketing as well as leveraging partners. The most notable of the latter is Trillium Software. The two companies have worked together to tightly integrate their respective offerings and they also have a joint marketing agreement. The company also partners with ASG (the Rochade metadata repository) and is expected to announce a formal partnership with a master data management solution in due course.

Users

Collibra has more than 30 customers, the majority of which are in the United States, and is currently doubling its customer base and revenue on a yearly basis.

Technology

Data Governance Center is in version 4.2. The individual products in the suite are available on any platform that supports Java and an Oracle or SQL Server database, with a browser-based front end. There is also a cloud-based option that has recently been released.

In order to enable the process automation that Collibra espouses, Data Governance Center includes a workflow engine and a lot of pre-built processes (as well as best practice operating models) that are delivered out-of-the box. Typical pre-built processes include such things as approval processes and issue management. A notable feature is that you can approve via email without actually having to open the tool.

Data Governance Center integrates with both data quality and master data management products. For example, you can feed Data Governance Center’s data quality dashboards with feeds from third party data cleansing and profiling tools, you can drill down to business/data quality rules that have been retrieved from data quality solutions, and it is typical that you would provision Data Governance Center’s reference data from any master data management product that was already installed.

Other notable features include (graphical—much of the product is graphical) business traceability, hierarchy management and semantic modelling (to support synonyms, homonyms and words in different languages). The product integrates with IBM’s Business Glossary and Informatica Metadata Manager.

Services

Collibra provides the usual sort of consulting, training and other services that one would expect from a software vendor. It is noteworthy that the company is working with partners to develop industry-specific content and we would expect Collibra to rely on such partners in these contexts.

Research

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Further Information »