Ataccama launched its Ataccama ONE Gen2 Platform into beta in November, and used its flagship customer event to highlight both its general availability and its ability to address customer concerns enumerated in a new study that was also featured at the event.

Last week, Ataccama, which makes a platform that provides a unified data quality, master data management, and data governance solution, held Ataccama Innovate, its major customer event, which was virtualized this year. The company highlighted the formal announcement of the general availability of the Ataccama ONE Gen2 Platform, which was announced in November, with the beta being launched at that time. It also released a new survey, the Enterprise Data Readiness Report, which it said provided strong evidence of an extremely strong opportunity for the type of integrated data quality solution they offer.

“We wanted to understand what’s preventing organizations from realizing the full potential of data-driven innovation,” said Michal Klaus, CEO of Ataccama, in his keynote. The data came from surveys with almost 1100 global executives and business users from midsize to large enterprises, and was conducted on Ataccama’s behalf by ResearchScape.

“The most important finding is that both executives and business managers see data as the key to busines innovation,” Klaus stressed.  79% of executives and 75% of line of business users said they faced problems with data quality,

“Both groups of users also see a lot of potential in how they work with data, and saw major potential for improvements,” he added. “These include fixing issues of data governance not being in place, and data privacy not being in place as well as poor data quality. While awareness of these issues is at a high level, actual achievement is fairly low. 69% still rely on email and 74% on Excel to share data. Only about 10% use a data catalogue for this.”

Other finds Klaus cited included 70% of respondents believing data quality negatively impacting their businesses, 54% seeing data regulations as limiting their ability to innovate, and 55% saying that data was of little use without data preparation.

“From these three numbers, we can see there is huge potential,” he emphasized. “Most new customers see data quality and data governance as tightly connected, and more than 90% prefer cloud deployment.”

Klaus then emphasized how the new Ataccama ONE Gen2 platform has the capabilities to deliver on this potential.

“After five months of beta, we released our new release a couple of weeks ago,” he said. ”We believe that with Gen 2, organizations and individuals will be able to bring innovation to a completely new level. This was our vision.”

Ataccama started out as a data quality vendor, added master data management to that, and most recently, introduced metadata management to the mix.

“These three modules complement each other,” said David Kolinek, Ataccama’s VP of Product Management. “They bring many new improvements that will help companies achieve their data quality objectives.”

“Gen2 is revolutionary for many reasons,” Klaus said. “One is that it is the is new modern way to deliver high quality data, with enterprise data quality fabric.”

What Klaus described as hundreds of new features begin with a new, fully configurable, AI-driven application layer that is focused on self-service, leveraging self-driving automation capabilities.

“This self-driving application later has been completely redesigned,” Klaus said. “We have also completely redesigned our Data Catalogue, which now also serves as a Data Marketplace. We rebuilt our data processing engine, and we reworked our PaaS [Platform as-a-Service] to run on Azure or AWS automatically.”

The new AI-powered features, powered by the new architecture with the AI Core at the center, drive the whole solution, instead of being simply a point solution within the portfolio. That’s a major change in Gen2, and also provides what Ataccama sees as a major differentiation with their competitors in the space. These AI features include business domain discovery, data classification, rules suggestion, relationship discovery, anomaly detection, and AI-based matching. A new hybrid MDM hub adds more flexibility and leverages tighter integration between the MDM hub, the Data Catalog, and Business Glossary.

“It all allows you to get quality data in hours rather than weeks, which it what it takes if you do all this stuff manually,” Klaus stated.

Ataccama is a Toronto-based company with a large development centre which is based in Prague, Czech Republic. The first version of the current Ataccama ONE platform was introduced at the end of 2017.