Data is one of the most valuable assets an enterprise has, which is why data governance is critical to modern business success.
Among the many vendors and services in thedata governancesector is Collibra, founded in 2008. This year,the vendor, based in New York City, has been busy, with a $100 million Series E round of funding in April and in June unveiling its Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud. The new system is a SaaS cloud offering that includes data governance, data catalog and data quality capabilities.
In this Q&A,Felix Van de Maele, co-founder and CEO of Collibra, discusses the challenges and opportunities of enterprise data governance and provides insight into where his company his headed in the future.
What has been the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Collibra?
Felix Van de Maele: As with every company, we had to definitely shift and become fully remote. That went relatively easy from a tooling perspective, because we already had a lot of employees working remotely.
We got lucky in the sense that we raised a new investment round in April. So that was good timing, with hindsight. So, from that sense, we were in a really strong position. But there was a lot of uncertainty in the April and May timeframe as nobody really knew how long the pandemic would last and what the recovery was going look like.
We did see business impact in the first half of the year. Companies still saw data governance as being important but from a budget perspective, a lot of companies were just taking a wait-and-see approach before spending.
Ever since the second quarter we have seen a strong recovery. I think it looks like a lot of companies have found their feet again and are reinvesting in data analytics and data governance.
What are common myths or misconceptions that you encounter about data governance?
Van de Maele: Part of the problem is with the name data governance itself, as it doesn't fully cover what companies need to do. That's why we now talk about data integrity as well.
The perception of data governance is that it's all about control and how to ensure compliance, and that continues to be really important. But data governance is also a type of technology that can help organizations treat data strategically.
Our belief is that the move to cloud and data lakes is good because it provides scale and will cost less, but ultimately that's not going to solve the problem.
