Key Takeaways: The 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Active Metadata Management

Gartner recently released its 2021 Market Guide for Active Metadata Management, meant to cover emerging markets currently in limbo.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released its new Market Guide for Active Metadata Management. The researcher’s Market Guide series is meant to cover new and emerging markets where software products and organizational requirements are in limbo. Gartner’s Market Guides can be a great resource for understanding how a fledgling space may line up with current and future technology needs.

According to Gartner, “The active metadata market offers a broad spectrum of data management tools that have specifically enabled significant active metadata use within their platform. Active metadata management is a set of capabilities that enable continuous access and processing of metadata that support ongoing analysis over a different spectrum of maturity, use cases, and vendor solutions. Active metadata outputs range from design recommendations based upon execution results and reports of runtime steps through, and indicators of, business outcomes achieved.”

Gartner recommends selecting metadata management solutions based on their ability to share internal metadata to support platform-to-platform orchestration. The researcher also thinks it’s a best practice to replace or augment systems that share only their design-based metadata. It is assumed that organizations adopting “aggressive” metadata analysis across their data management environment will decrease the time to delivery on new data assets by nearly three-quarters.

Gartner highlights the following providers in active metadata management: Adaptive, Alation, Alex Solutions, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ataccama, Atlan, BigID, Cambridge Semantics, Cinchy, CluedIn, Collibra, data.world, erwin by Quest, Global IDs, Google Cloud, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Infogix acquired by Precisely, Informatica, lo-Taho acquired by Hitachi Vantara, Irion, K2View, MANTA, Microsoft, NodeGraph, Octopai, Oracle, Orion Governance, OvalEdge, Precisely, Qlik, SAP, Semantic Web Company acquired by PoolParty, Smartlogic, Solidatus, Stratio, Talend, TIBCO Software, TopQuadrant, and Zeenea. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways.

Market adoption and the business value of active metadata management technologies are both on the rise. Gartner explains: “Existing purpose-built metadata management tools and solutions will be increasingly challenged as the primary metadata asset in the enterprise by adjacent data management platforms such as databases, data integration, data quality, and data governance tools.”

Gartner explains that the current crop of vendors are trending toward becoming metadata analysis and orchestration solutions, and in the future, competition will largely come from data management platforms that can absorb and refactor metadata in a flexible manner. Gartner concludes: “Nearly every data management market is undergoing a massive, user-driven disruption. Data management has begun a shift from managing the data content to focusing on metadata.”

Read the Market Guide for Active Metadata Management.