There are few better ways to drive interest in a commercial software product than releasing a free demo version, which is the strategy Tamr Inc. has decided to take with its metadata catalog. That helped attract more than 300 early testers whose feedback played an important part in shaping the public beta version that is rolling out this morning.

The aptly-named Tamr Data Catalog offers a much simpler alternative to the so-called “data lake” model for CIOs seeking to make information more accessible to their users. Instead of requiring an organization to consolidate its numerous disparate storage systems into a single giant repository, the platform generates a manifest of those systems that achieves the same effect.

Business users can check the index, which is kept continuously up-to-date using connectors that automatically pull changes made to the source data, to see exactly what information they have and where. That visibility makes it possible to connect the dots among disprate records with the same level of flexibility as if everything were in the same place

And the administrators tasked with enabling that work, in turn, are able to fulfill the demands of the business side without having to go through the hassle of manually pooling different datasets with varying sensitivities and making sure that the combined meets governance requirements. It’s a win-win proposition that has already helped Tamr land deals with a number of major enterprises.

Offering the catalog for free should help increase that momentum considerably. After all, the lower the barrier entry is to a solution, the broader the appeal, which translates into more leads to try and turn into paying customers. Tamr’s commercial offering builds upon the catalog with analytics functionality and third party integrations aimed at making it easier to process the indexed data.