Data quality is paramount for today’s digitized enterprises, but managing large, disparate information sources remains a significant challenge. Add to that the need for data observability and governance, as well as growing complexities from artificial intelligence, and a formidable operational minefield emerges.

What expert signals are percolating on the modern imperative for clean, accurate and reliable enterprise data?

Insights on data observability from the experts at Acceldata and Workday.

“Data observability is a new concept,” said Rohit Choudhary (pictured, right), founder and chief executive officer of Acceldata Inc. “It started emerging towards the end of 2018/2019, when people figured out that there’s going to be different data islands and the transfer of data is going to cause a lot of problems and create havoc for the enterprise. High-quality data is a challenge — doing it at a reasonable cost is [also] a challenge.”

Choudhary and Pravin Darbare (left), director of data platforms and operations at Workday Inc. U.S., spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Workday and Acceldata work together, as well as effective data management, observability and governance as essential for driving business success in an increasingly data-driven world. (* Disclosure below.)

Data observability: The new frontier

Unlike traditional application performance management, data observability provides tools to ensure data accuracy and reliability, crucial for business decision-making. High-quality data and reasonable cost management are central challenges addressed by this emerging field, according to Choudhary.

“When I was an application engineer, I had the right tool sets in my back pocket to go and figure out what was going wrong with the application performance, user experience, costs, stability, any of that,” he said. “But when I became a data engineer, what I found out was that not only was the stack very new, but there were just no tools to manage your data very accurately. And guess what? The proliferation of technologies just made it worse.”

Acceldata and Workday standardize within the Snowflake platform, lending relevance to the recent open table format announcement for Iceberg. With interoperability emerging as central to data strategies, the new format enables organizations to maintain data integrity across platforms.

“It’s really important to abstract this whole Iceberg discussion to think about what customers are really asking for,” Choudhary said. “They’re asking for interoperability. Interop is a core feature as companies go and decide their technical architecture because it cannot be tied to one vendor, one CSP and one ISV. You don’t want to tie yourself down to one stack or one platform.”

Workday’s approach focuses on future-proofing, building a next-generation data platform. By focusing on clean and reliable data, it aims to reduce decision latency and ensure timely business decisions. The company’s data stack, which includes Snowflake for analytics, integrates various data acquisition tools to handle different data patterns and ensure security and governance, according to Darbare.

“Quality is very important, and how do we look at the quality?” he said. “You can have thousands and thousands of attributes, and who is going to make the decisions for all of those? I think assistance should be there; technology should step in and start helping in those areas as well.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Data Cloud Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Acceldata Inc. and Workday Inc. U.S. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Acceldata and Workday nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE