Who is Alation, a recent Salesforce Ventures investment?

Founded in 2012, Alation is an enterprise data intelligence solution that includes features like data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. As a dominant player in the 'data catalog' market, they are well positioned in a space that predicts companies will collect 42.2% more data by end of 2022 than in 2020, according to research done by IDC.

What a company like Alation does is access the troves of data they are amassing and allows various teams within the organization to better synthesize data and access insights.

Why did Salesforce invest in Alation?

This is a page out of a familiar playbook for Salesforce Ventures, who was a heavy backer of Snowflake, a leading data warehousing vendor that has now become a strategic partner for Salesforce.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Satyen Sangani, Co-founder of Alation, elaborated on the capabilities of the platform. “Alation’s machine learning contributes to data search, data stewardship, business glossary, and data lineage,” Sangani said. “More specifically, Alation’s behavioral analysis engine spots behavioral patterns and leverages AI and machine learning to make data more user-friendly. For example, search is simplified by highlighting the most popular assets; stewardship is eased by emphasizing the most active data sets; and governance becomes a part of workflow through flags and suggestions.”

Sangani went on to say that plans for the deployment of the capital raised in this Series E include a "focus on engagement and adoption, collaboration, governance, lineage, and on APIs and SDKs to enable us to be open and extensible."

The API and SDK portion of that statement are important, given that Salesforce bills itself as a 360 Degree platform, helping it's Enterprise customers access a unified view of their customer - any tools that serve as an extension of their core product offerings and enable customers to get higher quality data insights is a benefit to the core Salesforce offering.

The biggest players in this market, which IDC estimates at a TAM of $7.9B are incumbents like Informatica, IBM, SAP, and Oracle - the key rivals to Salesforce since they got started over 20 years ago.

While some may think that parts of Alation's core product offering are competitive to elements of the Salesforce product suite - namely AI and Maching Learning capabilities as it relates to data analytics - the company as a whole plays in a much narrower space and therefore, isn't much of a competitor to Salesforce. The view is really that any company boosting the capabilities of the Salesforce platform and delivering more capabilities to the end customer as a result is a win for Salesforce - and even better if that vendor is an ally.