Quest Software Inc., the former Dell Technologies Inc. business unit that’s focused on enterprise data management and security, today announced a major update to its popular erwin Data Intelligence and erwin Data Modeler tools.

The revamped offerings enable companies to pursue a more comprehensive approach to managing, governing and using data to fuel their ambitions around artificial intelligence, according to Quest.

The company explains in its pitch that the ability to manage data effectively is essential for modern organizations, not just to become a leader in their industry, but simply to remain competitive at all. These days, as every organization races to implement AI technologies and advanced analytics, it has never been more important to maintain access to high-quality and reliable data.

But according to Quest, data quality and data visibility remain major challenges for enterprises. It cites preliminary data from its 2024 State of Data Intelligence report that shows how data quality monitoring remains one of the top-three data intelligence-related challenges for organizations today. Without having high quality data, companies will struggle to properly implement AI.

That explains why Quest is trying to solve challenges around data quality with its latest update. The revamped data intelligence and data modeling tools are designed to merge cross-platform data observability and advanced data quality management to ensure organizations always have access to the most reliable and relevant information for their AI initiatives.

Quest said erwin Data Intelligence 14 features an enhanced data quality and observability framework powered by AI and machine learning that’s able to monitor data health continuously across any system. Its new capabilities include advanced anomaly detection that ensures organization’s most critical data sources are reliable and accurate, and self-learning capabilities that automatically update the framework to meet each organization’s evolving data quality needs.

The new release also extends the possible deployment options for customers, thanks to the introduction of erwin Data Intelligence Cloud, which is hosted on Microsoft Azure. That’s in addition to the traditional on-premises and privately hosted options.

In addition, Quest said, the platform’s data quality discovery features have been made more accessible. The revamped user experience is more akin to searching for something on an online shopping site, and enables any user – not just data scientists and database experts – to explore data quality metrics via an easy-to-use analytics dashboard. According to Quest, that will make it easier for data consumers to find, analyze and act on higher-value data.

As for erwin Data Modeler 14, it comes with enhanced capabilities for streamlining data modeling processes, including simplified integration with modern data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks. It also beefs up support for NoSQL databases, adding reverse engineering tools that should make it easier for customers to design, manage and optimize their data architectures, and delivers improved integration for platforms such as Google BigQuery and PostgreSQL.

Quest Software Vice President of Product Bharath Vasudevan said organizations today need to ask themselves if their data is truly AI-ready or not, and answer that question honestly.

“At the core of this offering is our commitment to transforming data into strategic assets,” he explained. “By providing powerful tools for data modeling and intelligence and adhering to our rigorous ‘model to marketplace’ approach, Quest enables enterprises to ensure their data is well-structured, compliant, and readily accessible and actionable across the organization.”

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