Data visualisation, lineage, discovery and management software from a relatively new kid on the block, UK-based Solidatus, has been shortlisted for four A-Team Data Management Insight Awards. Winners will be decided by a panel of experts, incorporating results of a business-account poll into their final assessment — click here to vote.
Philip Dutton, co-founder at Solidatus, said the online poll ends today, 21 September. Solidatus is up for a gong in four categories — Best Data Lineage Solution, Best Data Governance Solution, Best Data Visualisation Provider, and Best Data Discovery & Catalog Solution.
Dutton [pictured] told Weirdware.com that the product has been winning customers over because it can bring real value to businesses very quickly.
“Which is sometimes a challenge in this space with the data and complexity that we’re dealing with. What we’ve designed is a tool that allows you to very quickly model and map organisational relationships.”
Traditionally, data lineage and the like is about describing how data flows through an organisation — where it comes from, where it goes to, who it goes to, maybe who it has had contact with, and so on. Solidatus does that, but is “much broader” in what it can do, said Dutton.
“You need to understand the implications of the people, the process and the data to really see the impact. For our tool we’ve made that very simple, so you no longer need to go to three different systems to do that, or have the information in three different places. You can have it in one play,” he said.
Additionally, Solidatus was founded in 2017 so the technology includes some innovations not yet pervasive in the market. The net effect is that the tool is a lot quicker to implement, with a view to not becoming extra work for the user — unlike some offerings in the space.
Also, the product can be “stood up” in one hour on a cloud platform and start working – as opposed to a month to install and then another month to configure, he said.
“This should be something that will fit in your process and that you can do really quickly because a lot of the time this is a control function, an auditing function or an impact assessment function, so it’s not something that you want to be spending 90% of your time doing,” Dutton said. “We were really looking for that quick ROI.”
Visualisation performance is also really key, partly because the number of systems used, particularly in large organisations, has gone on expanding — on top of growth in data harvesting and management as well as in regulation and the need for compliance.
“You don’t have just 10 systems anymore. Firms like Citi bank or HSBC now have 10,000 or 20,000 systems. Then you add this change cadence which has massively increased; previously everything was waterfall and we did things every three months, and now it’s agile or shift-left devops and it’s every week or every day,” Dutton said.
Citi bank in August announced it had taken a stake in previously fully self-funded Solidatus, which works primarily with consultancies and consultancy-led partners from the Big Four down to niche firms as well as UK distributors.
Citi is rolling Solidatus’ product out across its entire organisation to help it navigate the web of financial-services compliance issues as well as become much more data-centric, Dutton said.
“We’re a keystone of that transformation, so they wanted to see that we were supported and that others were able to utilise us in that same sort of fashion,” he said.
