The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalog for DataOps, Q2 2022

Updated December 26th, 2024
header image

Share this article

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalogs, Q3 2024 is out now! Atlan was named a leader in the report, scoring highest in the Current Offering and Strategy categories. According to the report, Atlan is an “unparalleled partner” for “organizations aiming for democratization and AI-enhanced self-service to governed data.” Get more insights in our latest blog.

Quick answer:

Pressed for time? Here’s a 30-sec summary of this blog:

  • Forrester released the Forrester Wave™ assessment of enterprise data catalogs for DataOps in Q2, 2022.
  • The assessment is a guide evaluating the 14 most significant enterprise data catalogs and awarding them scores based on:
    • Current offering
    • Product strategy
    • Market presence
  • This article covers the highlights of the Forrester Wave™ 2022 by going through key evaluation criteria.

Table of contents #

  1. Forrester Wave: Evaluation overview
  2. Forrester Wave Enterprise Data Catalogs: Key evaluation criteria
  3. Atlan, a Leader in Enterprise Data Catalogs
  4. How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan
  5. Related reads

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalog for DataOps, Q2 2022 is a guide for data leaders and practitioners to help consider and evaluate data catalogs for their organizations.

The Forrester Wave™ assessment evaluated the 14 most prominent enterprise data catalogs including Atlan, Alation, Collibra, data.world, Informatica, and Talend, on 26 evaluation criteria.

Atlan received the highest score possible in 17 out of 26 criteria.

Forrester Wave: Evaluation overview #

Each of the 14 enterprise data catalog providers under evaluation was ranked, positioned, and scored based on:

  1. Current offering
  2. Strategy
  3. Market presence

Current offering #


The Y-axis represents the strength — weaker to stronger — of the current product offering of each solution provider. The evaluation parameters include criteria such as cataloging; data intelligence; data governance, DataOps, and engineering; connectivity, interoperability & portability; and data as a service.

Strategy #


The X-axis represents the strength of their strategies. This includes product vision, market approach, performance, planned enhancements, innovation roadmap, and partner ecosystem.

Market presence #


The size of the circle represents market presence. This includes revenue, number of customers, and average deal size. A gray bubble or open dot represents a non-participating solution provider.

Forrester Wave Enterprise Data Catalogs: Key evaluation criteria #

Current offering #


Forrester assigns 50% of the ranking weightage to important product capabilities that are a must-have in an enterprise data cataloging solution. These capabilities include:

  1. Data and metadata management
  2. Types of data products supported — sources, tables, pipelines, policies, data models, etc
  3. Data discovery, profiling, and data lineage — impact and root cause analysis, and anomaly detection
  4. Monitoring, alerts, and compliance
  5. User experience — personalization and collaboration
  6. Ease of development and deployment
  7. Advanced support — testing, anomaly detection, and machine learning support
  8. Risk management — enabling data protection, privacy, and regulatory policies
  9. DevOps — customizability, and extensibility via APIs
  10. Cloud and data fabric connectors
  11. Integrations with BI, analytics, and data science tools
  12. Data orchestration
  13. Data quality and data lifecycle management

Strategy #


Forrester assigns another 50% of the ranking weightage to evaluate the enterprise data catalog product strategy. This includes:

  1. Product vision — vision alignment with the current and future needs of customers
  2. Market approach — proven go-to-market strategy with support for new verticals and geographies
  3. Performance — vital business metrics like revenue growth and profitability
  4. Planned enhancements — to support changing customer needs
  5. Innovation roadmap — a proven commitment to future innovation

Market presence #


Unlike the “current offering” and “strategy”, Forrester does not assign any ranking weightage to evaluate marketing presence. The key evaluation criteria include:

  1. Revenue growth
  2. Number of active customers
  3. Average deal size

This report serves as a guide for data leaders and practitioners to consider, evaluate and choose the right data catalog for their DataOps environment.

Atlan, a Leader in Enterprise Data Catalogs #

Atlan is recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps, Q2 2022 report.

Atlan is recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps, Q2 2022 report

Top analysts at Forrester Wave evaluated 14 of the most significant Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps | Source: Forrester Wave

Atlan received the highest score possible in 17 criteria, including Product Vision, Market Approach, Innovation Roadmap, Performance, Connectivity, Interoperability, and Portability.

Atlan received top scores in 17 criteria, including Product Vision, Market Approach, Innovation Roadmap, Performance, and Connectivity, Interoperability, and Portability.

Atlan received top scores in 17 criteria, including Product Vision, Market Approach, Innovation Roadmap, Performance, Connectivity, Interoperability, and Portability. | Source: Forrester Wave

According to the Forrester report, “Atlan is the tool of choice for DataOps and data product deployment.” Forrester also goes on to state that Atlan’s, “extensive integration makes data sharing easy, flexible, and scalable within hybrid distributed ecosystems for analytics and operational use cases.”

If you are evaluating an enterprise data catalog for your organization, take Atlan for a spin. Atlan is a third-generation data catalog and metadata management tool built on the premise of embedded collaboration that is key in today’s modern workplace, borrowing principles from GitHub, Figma, Slack, Notion, Superhuman, and other modern tools that are commonplace today.

Atlan Demo: Enterprise data catalog for DataOps

How organizations making the most out of their data using Atlan #

The recently published Forrester Wave report compared all the major enterprise data catalogs and positioned Atlan as the market leader ahead of all others. The comparison was based on 24 different aspects of cataloging, broadly across the following three criteria:

  1. Automatic cataloging of the entire technology, data, and AI ecosystem
  2. Enabling the data ecosystem AI and automation first
  3. Prioritizing data democratization and self-service

These criteria made Atlan the ideal choice for a major audio content platform, where the data ecosystem was centered around Snowflake. The platform sought a “one-stop shop for governance and discovery,” and Atlan played a crucial role in ensuring their data was “understandable, reliable, high-quality, and discoverable.”

For another organization, Aliaxis, which also uses Snowflake as their core data platform, Atlan served as “a bridge” between various tools and technologies across the data ecosystem. With its organization-wide business glossary, Atlan became the go-to platform for finding, accessing, and using data. It also significantly reduced the time spent by data engineers and analysts on pipeline debugging and troubleshooting.

A key goal of Atlan is to help organizations maximize the use of their data for AI use cases. As generative AI capabilities have advanced in recent years, organizations can now do more with both structured and unstructured data—provided it is discoverable and trustworthy, or in other words, AI-ready.

Tide’s Story of GDPR Compliance: Embedding Privacy into Automated Processes #

  • Tide, a UK-based digital bank with nearly 500,000 small business customers, sought to improve their compliance with GDPR’s Right to Erasure, commonly known as the “Right to be forgotten”.
  • After adopting Atlan as their metadata platform, Tide’s data and legal teams collaborated to define personally identifiable information in order to propagate those definitions and tags across their data estate.
  • Tide used Atlan Playbooks (rule-based bulk automations) to automatically identify, tag, and secure personal data, turning a 50-day manual process into mere hours of work.

Book your personalized demo today to find out how Atlan can help your organization in establishing and scaling data governance programs.

Share this article

[Website env: production]