Even though data management has seen constant innovation in recent years, the people and process side of the equation continues to lag behind because it can still be cumbersome for domain experts to trust and gain insights from data.

With cost control, productivity and efficiency being top of mind for enterprises, the need for data intelligence has become more critical, especially when scaling data from an organizational perspective, according to Felix Van de Maele (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Collibra NV, who said that this prompts the “data citizen” concept because everyone in the enterprise ought to have easy access to trustworthy data.

“We all know the constraint and the challenges with data, how to actually do data at scale,” Van de Maele said. “Now’s the time we need to look beyond just the technology and infrastructure to think of how to scale data, how to manage data at scale. And that’s why now is really the time to deliver this data intelligence vision, the data intelligence platform.”

Van de Maele spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at  “Data Citizens 2022,”, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of data intelligence in enterprises and how quality and observability fit into the picture. (* Disclosure below.)

Data observability and quality are key

As data becomes mission critical, Van de Maele believes the observability and quality aspects have to be considered. As a result, cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence come in handy when monitoring data pipelines in the cloud.

“I think there are a lot of reasons why we’re so excited about quality and observability now,” he stated. “One is around leveraging AI, machine learning to drive more automation. The second is that those data pipelines that are now being created in the cloud, in these modern data architectures, they’ve become mission critical. They’ve become real time.”

The need for a data marketplace is being driven from both innovation and product perspectives. Therefore, Collibra’s goal is to make its accessibility easier, according to Van de Maele.

“How do we make available a true kind of shopping experience so that anybody in your organization can, in a very easy search, find the right data product, find the right data set?” he asked. “How do we help organizations drive adoption, tell them where they’re working really well and where they have opportunities?”

Since the data intelligence mission is at the heart of Collibra, Van de Maele believes it has set the ball rolling in terms of the data-citizen objective. Therefore, the vision is to continue making data trustworthy and mission critical.

“How do we make sure that as Collibra becomes this kind of mission-critical enterprise platform from a security performance architecture scale?” he asked. “Our mission is to deliver trusted data for every user, every use case and across every source. So while it’s been an incredible journey over the last 14, 15 years, I think we’re still relatively early in our mission to be able to [enable] everyone … to be able to use trusted data in an easy manner.”

One of Collibra’s key differentiators is the ability to drive a lot of automation through workflows. This, coupled with Collibra Protect for Snowflake, makes data governance seamless, according to Van de Maele.

“We provided a new low code, no code kind of workflow designer experience. So, really, customers can take it to the next level,” he noted. “There’s a lot more new product around Collibra Protect, which in partnership with Snowflake — which has been a strategic investor in Collibra — focused on how do we make access governance easier? How are we able to make sure that as you move to the cloud, things like access management, sensitive data, PII data is managed in a much more effective way?”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Data Citizens 2022 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Data Citizens 2022 event. Neither Collibra NV, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE