The BBC has appointed Alation to help with its data cataloguing efforts.
The £1.2 million contract will see the software firm’s tools deployed to help map and understand the BBC’s sprawling and extensive data estate.
Alation beat 14 other suppliers to the deal, a contract notice showed this week – five months after the BBC went to market in July this summer.
The software will be wielded by the BBC Product Group’s data governance team, to deliver “trusted data to support a data informed BBC” and help the broadcaster have “connected, discoverable and governed data.”
The contract is for a five-year term. It comes as the BBC has been hiring widely for data governance roles. Recent job descriptions have described these as “transitioning the BBC to a data product organisation, evolving our data architecture and embedding data capabilities company wide”.
The broadcaster has been under huge funding pressure since 2010 and late to the party on making the most of stream content and content personalisation. Among other ongoing efforts, it hired Aviva veteran Nathalie Berdat as its first Head of Data & AI Governance in early 2023.
Silicon Valley-based Alation, founded in 2012, has landed 40% of the Fortune 100 as customers and provides software that helps understand data lineage, among other capabilities. At its back-end are over 100 connectors for a wide variety of data sources including BI tools, databases, and file systems spanning everything from S3, via Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Github, IBM DB2, MongoDB, SQL Server, SAP HANA, etc.
“There are range of different mechanisms that you can use to talk to a database” CEO Satyen Sangani explained to The Stack in an in-depth 2023 interview (see below). “The most common one is to fire a SQL query directly into the database. But there are other interfaces, JDBC, ODBC...”
Alation users connect to a database and use it to start issuing “a standard set of sort of requests into that database, like, ‘what are your tables?’ ‘What are the column names?’ ‘How many people have used this particular thing?’ ‘Who are the users on this server?’ ‘What are the queries that people have historically written?’ Sangani explained.
