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2 min1 speaker

A Re:Govern 2023 clip. Mark Kidwell explains why Autodesk needed a catalog ("alarm bells blaring", not signals), why an open source deployment fell behind demand almost as soon as it shipped, and how Atlan now sits at the center of connecting Autodesk's data publishers and consumers.

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Moderator

0:05 Mark, I'll, I'll kind of position the, the same question. I mean, what are the signals that you need something? And, you know, how does that become the data catalog, and what did you see in Atlan that think, that you thought this could solve that problem right now?

Mark Kidwell

0:23 Yeah. I, I think in, in our case they weren't so much signals as alarm bells blaring. We were in the search of a data catalog and had been looking and trying to find a replacement for this homegrown catalog for the better part of, of several years. And it just became more and more acute where we couldn't find the right fit with what we were looking for looking at either other vendors or open source solutions. We actually tried some. We went through an entire deployment of an open source version.

0:51 Everything, you know, that we did was incrementally better, but the demand for the kinds of things that a data catalog solved for, you know, people were asking questions, really basic things all the time, and to some extent they still do on our Slack channels, you know, around ownership or how these data work. And it, it wasn't sustainable at the scale where we were already at several years ago. It certainly wasn't sustainable, you know, as we continued to grow and grow. So, so for us, you know, we, we knew it had to be done, it was just finding that right fit.

1:24 And even though we invested in building out an open source solution, almost as soon as it, as we completed it, we saw there were a lot of things that we just couldn't keep up with. We couldn't extend it ourselves. There was no way we were gonna keep up with demand for this, so we just started the search over again. We had no problem going back and saying, "You know, this didn't, wasn't the... It's a big step forward, but it wasn't the best thing we can do. What's the best thing we can do?" And we, we ran a, an evaluation process. We, we looked at the, the leaders in the space.

1:54 Atlan, it, you know, met all of our criteria and then a lot more. You know, there's a lot of things that we're working with our stakeholders internally and trying to find new ways to use Atlan and the catalog to connect our data publishers and our data consumers, different data types, enabling different kinds of workflows, all of these things that we're planning. The catalog is core to that. It's the center of bringing people together and finding data on our platform.

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