Roadmap for Collibra platform includes more speed and scale

Collibra plans to add speed and scale to its data management platform.

Collibra, a cloud-based data management vendor founded in 2008 and based in New York, first introduced Data Intelligence Cloud a year ago.

Data Intelligence Cloud is an end-to-end data management platform that automates workflows to prepare data for analysis. It includes data scoring to measure the quality of data; individual rights management to govern data and keep customers compliant; enhanced support for extract, transform and load tools; and connectivity that enables metadata ingestion from data lakes and data warehouses.

At Data Citizens '21, Collibra's virtual conference, the vendor on June 17 rolled out its "March to a Billion" initiative to enable customers to use up to one billion data assets without limitations within the Data Intelligence Cloud by the end of 2022.

Currently, the Collibra platform enables customers to amass and use about 250 million technical and lineage data assets -- data types most often used by developers -- without limitations.

The vendor plans to double that 250 million to 500 million by the end of 2021, increase it to 750 million by midyear 2022 and finally reach one billion during the fourth quarter of next year.

In addition to scale, Collibra said it plans to add speed to its platform over the same time period.

Now, it is able to ingest 25 million technical and lineage assets data per hour. Collibra's plan is to increase that to 50 million by the end of this year, 75 million by mid-2022 and 100 million by the end of 2022.

Regarding the curated data assets most often used by business analysts, the Collibra platform is currently able to ingest 50,000 per hour and enable the use of 5 million without limitations. The vendor plans to increase those to 2 million per hour and enable the use of 25 million by the end of 2022.

"We [already] have really strong performance, but our customers keep asking for more," said Jim Cushman, Collibra's chief product officer, during a presentation at Data Citizens '21.

He added that many customers already store and use more than 250 million technical and lineage data assets and 5 million curated assets, but the March to a Billion is about enabling their use at speed and scale with no limitations.

We [already] have really strong performance, but our customers keep asking for more.

"This is what we will be able to offer without any conditions without fail, and it will go higher and higher," Cushman said.

That focus on speed and scale is important and demonstrates that Collibra has moved well past the startup phase and has built a strong platform, according to Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy.

Having rolled out the Data Intelligence Cloud a year ago, Collibra's technology is mature. Focusing on performance rather than adding new features will keep attracting new customers, he said.

"Collibra has matured into a genuine enterprise software provider, delivering not only features and functions but meeting challenging needs such as performance, scalability and resilience across multiple departments," Farmer said. "The result is somewhat less innovation -- [which is] an opportunity for emerging vendors -- but a market of high-spending, committed long-term customers."

Speed and scale, he added, are already differentiators for Collibra, so adding even more of each will boost the competitive differentiation of the Collibra platform.

Meanwhile, further evidence that Collibra is focused on the right things is that some organizations are now listing Collibra skills as a job requirement, according to Farmer.

"That's a good endorsement of their strategy," he said. "They are becoming an essential component of their customers' enterprise stack."

Collibra's plan to add more speed and scale to its platform comes about four months after the vendor acquired OwlDQ, a predictive data quality firm based in Glenelg, Md., whose platform uses machine learning to ensure that data can be used for business intelligence.

Using the capabilities acquired with OwlDQ, Collibra recently introduced Data Quality, a tool that enables users to set a baseline for data quality and subsequently automate data quality testing.

Cushman said Collibra plans to enhance Data Quality with new capabilities in early 2022. Among them are a more immersive experience that lessens the need to toggle between environments, and continuous data profiling so data is constantly being brought up to a usable standard and available for analysis.

Finally, Collibra, which is already available on AWS and Google Cloud, will become available on Microsoft Azure during the third quarter of this year, according to Cushman.

"Collibra has done an excellent job of enabling a gradual rollout of their product in the enterprise," Farmer said. "By that I mean that you don't need to build a mega-catalog all at once to get the value of their platform. Little by little, department by department, the value can be realized early and gradually expanded over the scale of the enterprise."