Market Perspectives

The annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Digital Leadership Awards showcase the professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that contribute significantly to improved efficiency, productivity and the performance of their organization. This prestigious award recognizes leaders and pioneers who have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology.

Ventana Research has awarded Denise Swanson at Chewy, Inc. using Alation its prestigious 2021 Digital Leadership Award in Data. This award recognizes the individual, organization and technology that best exemplifies leadership in data and related technologies for supporting data- and information management-related needs. All award finalists in data were considered for this prestigious award.

Organizations of all sizes and industries find themselves deluged by an unceasing torrent of data coming from a multitude of sources in many formats which are stored in disparate systems. The challenge is capturing data at lowest levels of detail, keeping more history than ever before and managing the storage of the increasing volumes of data. But for some organizations, applying data science and using machine learning and predictive analytics is where the true value is derived from data.

Ventana Research selected Chewy for the 14th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Data for its leadership to govern and utilize data most effectively across the organization. As part of Chewy's strategy to more effectively use data and empower all users to find, understand and trust data regardless of where it resides, they decided to make an investment to ensure its effectiveness. Chewy set out on a cloud migration strategy and purchased Snowflake as their data cloud platform to scale dynamically in peak periods and Alation for governing the use of the data across business. The cloud migration process revealed a lack of data literacy and transparency across the company, creating a significant challenge to moving the customer data. Because multiple business units had their own data sets and defined their own metrics, when it came time to catalog and move the data, it took weeks for the various internal business teams just to agree on definitions.

Using Alation to catalog critical customer data as it was moved to Snowflake helped Chewy accelerate their cloud migration and organization-wide adoption of Snowflake. Alation + Snowflake has reduced data silos and improved data visibility and data literacy throughout the organization. Standardized data definitions and lineage features in Alation help users save significant time finding the right data for analysis, increasing analyst productivity. By using the Alation Policy Manager, Chewy has put data governance into the hands of business units, replacing company-wide security role-based access.

Today, users have a majority of requests answered immediately using the curated data, resulting in a significant reduction in spam emails and a high reduction in dataops tickets. When new objects are proposed to the data platforms, the first stop is Alation. Using Alation, Chewy was able to reduce data redundancy through inventory transparency. Alation has prevented data duplications and has highlighted existing redundancy in the platforms. Alation enables analysts to produce more in-depth results to the business allowing Chewy to develop and deliver the products and services most valuable to their “pet parents."

Data is a software category in need of innovation and optimization. Alation addresses the challenges of enabling the intelligent governance of data across all roles in the organization. Organizations with the need to have accurate data across the organization will appreciate its ability to enable data governance with stewardship that is embraced across an organization.

Organizations looking to maximize the value of its business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how Data can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Alation can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Denise Swanson at Chewy, for your leadership.

Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on big data and information management to help you expand competencies that will enhance the value of information. Our insights on smarter storage, integration, virtualization, governance and preparation will enable you to embrace new methods for using information effectively. Change is required to maintain competitiveness and to enable business resilience and data readiness to achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.