The new partnership aims to provide joint customers with complementary capabilities to help them better find relevant data for analysis and manage their data assets.
Reltio and Collibra on Thursday unveiled a new integration aimed at enabling joint customers to more easily discover and govern data assets across domains within their organizations.
Using Reltio Integration for Collibra, which combines the key capabilities of the two vendors, customers can take advantage of Reltio's data unification platform in concert with Collibra's Data Intelligence Platform, including its data catalog.
Potential benefits, among others, include reducing the time it takes to find and operationalize reports, dashboards, models and other data assets, along with improved data governance and data lineage capabilities.
In addition, cost savings is a benefit. Users do have to pay for the integration, but Reltio Integration for Collibra is priced lower than what it would cost for a joint customer to configure an integration on their own, according to Venki Subramanian, Reltio's senior vice president of product management. Specific pricing details were not disclosed.
Given the different capabilities of Reltio and Collibra and the potential advantages of using their tools in concert with one another through a preconfigured integration, the partnership between the vendors is significant for joint customers, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
Reltio and Collibra are in adjacent spaces and fill different needs, so it's a complementary pairing that should benefit joint customers. The prebuilt integration between the two technologies will make it easier for customers to deploy and use the technologies together.
Doug HenschenAnalyst, Constellation Research
"Reltio and Collibra are in adjacent spaces and fill different needs, so it's a complementary pairing that should benefit joint customers," he said. "The prebuilt integration between the two technologies will make it easier for customers to deploy and use the technologies together."
Reltio is a master data management specialist based in Redwood Shores, Calif., whose AI-powered Connected Data Platform enables users to unify data to develop trusted data tools to inform decisions. The vendor's June platform update included a generative AI assistant that enables conversational interactions with data, along with prebuilt industry-specific master data management tools.
Collibra, meanwhile, is based in New York City and Brussels, and offers metadata data management capabilities, including a data catalog and data governance tools, through its Data Intelligence Platform.
In April, the vendor's platform update featured the general availability of Collibra AI Governance. The tool enables users to better manage AI models and applications, including generative AI, as their use expands beyond teams of data scientists.
New capabilities
At the enterprise level where organizations collect billions of data points and develop thousands of data products such as reports, dashboards and models, relevant data is difficult -- perhaps nearly impossible -- to discover without implementing systems to organize it all.
And it is only becoming harder to discover without highly organized systems in place, given that the volume of data and its complexity are continuing to increase.
Master data management is one method of organizing data. In particular, it enables enterprises to make sure their data is uniform, that there aren't separate records for one data point or data set and that the terminology used to define data is consistent.
Catalogs are another way to organize data. Data catalogs are a means of indexing and governing data across systems and domains so data does not get isolated and is easy to access, irrespective of where an employee works within an organization.
By combining Reltio's master data management capabilities with Collibra's data catalog and other data intelligence tools, the integration aims to enable faster and easier discovery of the trusted data needed to inform a given decision. Such data discovery is particularly relevant now, as enterprises aim to develop more AI models and applications -- including generative AI -- that require copious amounts of appropriate data to be accurate and reduce the likelihood of hallucinations.
"This partnership reflects a lot of synergies between the two primary disciplines of each company," said Stewart Bond, an analyst at IDC.
In particular, combining Reltio's master data management capabilities with Collibra's data catalog and governance capabilities will be beneficial, he continued. Collibra does not have master data management tools and Reltio does not offer a data catalog.
"It's a win-win for both," Bond said. "There are some overlaps in data quality capabilities, but the overlaps are more complementary than competitive."
Motivation for the partnership and integration resulted from a shared goal of developing an open data ecosystem for Reltio and Collibra users. By doing so, Reltio and Collibra can provide users with a choice of different partners with which to use each vendor's capabilities, according to Subramanian.
He noted that from Reltio's perspective, it views Collibra as one of the top data catalog, metadata management and data governance providers. That makes it a logical partner for Reltio, which did not previously have a native integration with a data catalog vendor, Subramanian said.
However, toward its goal of developing a broad ecosystem for data management and analysis, the partnership is not exclusive and Collibra likely won't be the last data catalog vendor with which Reltio partners.
"While Collibra is the first native integration we have with a data catalog, we are working on extending our integrations to other products in this space," Subramanian said. "Reltio integrates with not only data catalogs, but also other data management capabilities like data lakes, data warehouses and data enrichment solutions."
Specific goals of the partnership include the following:
Cost savings by providing a prebuilt integration between Reltio and Collibra that would otherwise require joint customers to invest time and money to engineer on their own.
Integration between the Collibra Data Catalog and Reltio's master data management and data unification tools to make trusted data easily discoverable in the data catalog.
Accelerated time-to-value by automatically synchronizing metadata from Reltio with metadata in Collibra.
Improved data governance in Reltio through Collibra's policy, privacy and security control settings.
Automated data mapping to provide data lineage information that enables users to understand the sources and uses of data assets to engender trust.
Self-service configuration that allows joint customers to update their integration through Reltio's low-code/no-code integration hub.
Cost savings and time-to-value are important, but they're commonplace when vendors partner and develop integrations, according to Henschen.
What separates routine partnerships that largely represent marketing opportunities from more meaningful integrations are whether the partnerships go deeper and enable a tight-knit integration between two otherwise separate platforms, he continued.
Reltio Integration for Collibra represents a tight-knit integration, according to Henschen.
Beyond touting improved time-to-value and lowering the cost associated with using the platforms together without a prebuilt integration, Henschen noted that one important potential benefit includes adding Collibra's policy, privacy and security controls and automated data lineage capabilities to Reltio. Another significant benefit is using the Reltio Integration Hub to keep integrations between the vendors current.
"It sounds like there's some substance to this partnership," he said.
Collibra's data catalog capabilities can now be combined with Reltio's master data management tools, thanks to the new integration between the two companies.
Next steps
With Reltio Integration for Collibra now available to joint customers, one of Reltio's primary product development goals is to improve its data unification capabilities through AI and automation, according to Subramanian. In addition, the vendor plans on adding new prepackaged industry-specific tools to simplify master data management and add more integrations to broaden its ecosystem.
Henschen noted that Reltio's focus on AI and automation is appropriate. Collibra, as evidenced by its most recent platform update, is similarly adding AI capabilities.
But while both are adding AI tools to simplify using their platform, Reltio and Collibra each also have an opportunity to help customers more easily develop their own AI models and applications, Henschen said.
"The [data integration] market is consolidating, and the bar is being raised with the infusion of GenAI technologies that depend on data, so I'd like to see Reltio develop or partner to gain deeper data integration capabilities," Henschen said. "GenAI is also making its mark on data intelligence platforms, so I'd like to see more from Collibra on how catalog and policy work can be automated."
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
