The Solution

Having clearly defined their needs, the EIM team explored a variety of solutions for data cataloging and monitoring. It didn’t take long for them to rule out the legacy suites from many of the software giants. Data cataloging and quality were not the primary focus for these legacy providers. And were KW to opt for one of their bundles, they’d be locked into a complex ecosystem of other products they didn’t need along with the price tag to match.

“We were in need of two core platform competencies, we didn’t need ten. We wanted those things to be best of breed at what they did,” said Miller.

Because the EIM team was looking for vendors whose core competency was data governance, KW ultimately selected Alation as its data catalog and Anomalo for data quality monitoring. With Anomalo and Alation, Keller Williams could buy the solutions they needed through a flexible licensing process far less rigid than other vendors.

Critically, Anomalo and Alation have a native integration that lets mutual customers seamlessly view data quality in the context of the data catalog:

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For the EIM team, this was compelling because Alation and Anomalo effectively behave as one unified product. When starting with Anomalo, KW used Alation’s popularity feature to identify which of their 1300+ tables to prioritize. So far, they’ve configured deep data quality monitoring for 250 tables and higher-level table observability for another set that didn’t require quite that level of profiling.

Because Anomalo and Alation continue to invest in their partnership, the value proposition only increases over time. For instance, Alation’s data lineage features now enhance Anomalo’s ability to trace how data quality affects KW’s entire stack. That way, when Anomalo detects a discrepancy, it’s easy to understand how that fits into upstream data sources and downstream data consumers.

The Outcome

Since transitioning to Anomalo and Alation, KW has moved significantly along the data management maturity curve. The two data governance solutions are a few key components behind a cultural shift at Keller Williams — the entire company, not just the EIM team, can now naturally incorporate data into their workflows to steer business decisions.

Both Anomalo and Alation emphasize universal accessibility, meaning that everyone, from non-technical users to veteran data scientists, can find the platforms intuitive to use. The EIM team viewed it as a major success because the solutions also seek to elevate the company’s overall data literacy.

KW achieved these results at an estimated cost savings of 10x compared to bundled legacy solutions. Not only that, the software’s value is projected to grow over time.

Miller set out to achieve a few goals with Alation: “We wanted to make our data available to people, to spread knowledge, and to provide availability to our team members so people know what we’ve got, what they can trust, and how everything is defined and layers together. We wanted a place where we could centralize all that information documentation. Alation seemed to nail that.”

The trust element Miller mentioned also speaks to the quality of Anomalo’s integration with Alation. The integration is so smooth that it feels like a single-product experience.

The EIM team derives value in two main ways from Anomalo.