---
title: "Build vs. buy - why FOX chose Atlan over building their own open source Data Catalog"
url: "https://atlan.com/build-vs-buy-open-source-vs-atlan/"
description: "Mihir Modi of Fox on why the team moved from building on open-source Amundsen to Atlan: a homegrown catalog would have taken a year to reach where the market already was."
keywords: "DataOps Platform, Platform Demo, Atlan Demo, Atlan Platform"
---

> Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/

# Build vs. buy: why Fox chose Atlan over open source

Videos / On demand / Recorded October 23, 2023 / 1:47

Watch: https://atlan.com/build-vs-buy-open-source-vs-atlan/

Mihir Modi of Fox started on open-source Amundsen and planned to build on it. Time to market changed his mind: a homegrown catalog needed a year before it could compete.

## Speakers

- Austin Kronz, Director of Data Strategy, Atlan (host)
- Mihir Modi, Data Governance Manager, Fox

## Related videos

- [Why Fox chose Atlan as its one-stop data platform](https://atlan.com/why-fox-chose-atlan-as-their-one-stop-data-platform/) (1 min)
- [Fox on why you need a modern data catalog](https://atlan.com/fox-on-why-you-need-a-modern-data-catalog/) (2 min)
- [Context Agents demo](https://atlan.com/context-agents-demo/) (13 min)
- [What is a context layer for AI systems?](https://atlan.com/know/enterprise-context-layer/videos/what-is-a-context-layer/) (10 min)

## Transcript

**Austin Kronz**

[0:05] Maybe focusing on specifically like open source versus, you know, why didn't you just build this internally versus why go with something like Atlan? You mentioned it's a positive to be built on open source, but then, you know, maybe trying to build this just purely on your own from an open source Yeah, absolutely.

**Mihir Modi**

[0:22] Wonderful question. So in fact, my first journey with the catalog was starting with Amundsen, which was purely open source, right? So the idea was to build and bake some in-house product out of that open source catalog, which is Amundsen. But I think one thing which we realized was that there is always a time to market, right? You can't keep on building those features internally. You would at least need a year to kind of come up with a product and, you know, by that time, the industry would be have, have been, you know, far ahead, right? We, all of us are trying to solve some common data problems, embark our journey to data mesh.

[0:55] That kind of, you know, you know, allowed us that, hey, let's not kind of, you know, look at purely kind of, you know, building our own homegrown solution, but rather go with a partner, go with a, you know, vendor which can enable and achieve all our goals, our core values, and you know, keep on adding new things, right? So whether it's automation coming to Atlan AI, you know updating those quickly, those metadata, so that's kind of, you know, the thought process was.

**Austin Kronz**

[1:23] Yeah, that makes sense. I, you know, I've heard that in, in different ways, but meaning the same thing, I think. The best way I've heard it was we, we don't wanna spend time managing the platform, we wanna use the platform, right? And I think when you go the build route, oftentimes you, you do spend more time building out the platform than you do using the platform. So that's great.