Analyst Perspectives

As I recently noted, the term “data intelligence” has been used by multiple providers across analytics and data for several years and is becoming more widespread as software providers respond to the need to provide enterprises with a holistic view of data production and consumption. I assert that through 2027, three-quarters of enterprises will be engaged in data intelligence initiatives to increase trust in their data by leveraging metadata to understand how, when and where data is used in their organization, and by whom. One of the first software providers to embrace the term data intelligence was Collibra. Although the company remains best known for its data governance and data catalog functionality, Collibra has created a platform for data intelligence through a combination of internal development and acquisitions that provides functionality for the governance of data and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, as well as data lineage, data quality and data privacy.

Collibra was founded in 2008 by Chief Executive Officer Felix Van de Maele and Chief Data Citizen Stijn Christiaens. A spin-off from the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium, Collibra quickly established itself as a key provider in the data governance sector and the emerging market for data catalog software products. In addition to providing the core functionality for standardizing data governance and enabling self-service data access across a distributed enterprise, Collibra was early to identify the need to provide customers with information about how, when and where data is being produced and consumed across an enterprise. This is the essence of the concept of Data Intelligence and is combined with the company’s core functionality for data integration, data governance, data quality, data lineage, data privacy and AI governance in the Collibra Data Intelligence Platform. Collibra is funded by investors including Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Sofina, Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, CapitalG, Dawn Capital, Durable Capital Partners, ICONIQ Capital and Index Ventures. Together, these investors provided Collibra with a $250 million Series G funding round, announced in November 2021, that valued the company at $5.25 billion. AI and data platforms provider Snowflake also became an investor in early 2022.

Data intelligence is fundamental to strategic data democratization initiatives to provide data analysts and business users with governed self-service access to data. Removing barriers that prevent or delay users from gaining access to data enables it to be treated as a product that is generated and consumed internally by workers or externally by partners and customers. For many enterprises, self-service access to data has long been a goal, but few have achieved it. Only 15% of participants in our ISG Analytics and Data Benchmark Research are very comfortable allowing business users to work with data that has not been integrated or prepared by IT. Many enterprises see data catalogs as the solution to data democratization because they provide a central repository of the data used across an enterprise, along with guided data discovery capabilities and natural language search. Self-service access to data is only truly valuable if users can trust the data they have access to, however. As such, data intelligence requires a combination of data catalog, data governance, data quality and data privacy capabilities.

Collibra’s initial focus on data governance and data cataloging has been expanded in recent years through a number of acquisitions and internal development, all of which are available via the Collibra Data Intelligence Platform. The company acquired automated technical lineage provider SQLdep in 2019 before launching what is now Collibra Data Lineage the following year. In 2021, it acquired predictive data quality software provider OwlDQ to form the basis of Collibra Data Quality & Observability. That was followed in 2022 by the introduction of Collibra Protect for data access policy development and management as well as Collibra Data Marketplace capabilities for self-service data discovery. Collibra also announced the acquisition of Husprey in 2023 for its SQL data notebook functionality. This was the basis for Collibra Data Notebook, which enables users to query and visualize data residing in data platforms governed by Collibra without having to exit Collibra Data Intelligence Platform, and publish notebooks containing queries and visualizations as assets to be consumed by other users. Most recently, Collibra expanded its purview to cataloging AI use cases and governing the use of data by AI applications with the launch of Collibra AI Governance in February 2024.

In addition to the core functionality, another component of Collibra Data Intelligence Platform is Collibra Usage Analytics, which provides enterprises with insights on their use of Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. We see this as critical to the concept of data intelligence since it provides enterprises with information about how, when and where data is being produced and consumed, and as such, it could benefit from greater emphasis by Collibra as a differentiating capability. In the interim, I recommend that enterprises include Collibra in their evaluations for a strategic investment in data intelligence, as well as more tactical data governance, data cataloging, data quality and data lineage use cases.

Regards,

Matt Aslett