Why SMG Swiss Marketplace Group chose Atlan

Amy Raygada

0:06 It was quite interesting actually because when I joined this team and the merger, you know, and I ended up in the central team, we were already using dbt, and we were using these dbt docs. But when I spoke with my boss, I told him, "Look, I don't think this is really gonna work because business people cannot really access these dbt, you know, docs, and it's not really easy for business people to come here, here and understand. And also the definitions that are here are very technical, are not really, you know, very business oriented." So I started to do my POC.

0:40 I was starting to you know, get some tools, and then someone told me that someone else in the company was doing the same thing. So they were doing evaluations of other tools as well from another business unit, and then I had to reach out to these people, and we kind of, you know, merged our forces to be able to find the right tool. So we went, for example, to open the data, but it was a little bit too technical as well.

1:03 We also did Alation, we did Atlan, and at the end we decided to do it with Atlan because it was more easy of, of the the integration with dbt first because we already had all this metadata. Everything was very well defined on dbt, so this integration will allow us to bring a lot of things automated for us. And also because the, it was very easy to use for all the business people because it's more readable, it's legible.

1:30 You can have the owners, the owners can edit, for example, the README side of things without actually to fill out all the other stuff manually because we will bring everything automated using the, you know, custom metadata features or even the, the metadata that is already, you know, basic for Atlan. So they can discover more things. They can they are checking also on the Looker dashboards from there already checking dbt, dbt tests and, and and we have some scoring now that we're gonna implement as well to understand if this asset is certified or not so they can...

2:07 The, for example, the, the turnaround time for a data analyst, let's say, to, to search on a data asset, it will be three days to make sure it's, you know, curated, clean with tests and everything. But with these scores, we're gonna be able to save time for this person just to come, explore, see that it's certified, they can take it and use it immediately to develop a dashboard. So I think this is the kind of things that made us go through Atlan and to understand the need of this because it makes the exploration of the data much easier.

2:37 And if you combine it with your own data platform, because we do a lot of things in GCP like PII data and, and, and also some metadata there as well it's powerful when you combine you know, different tools to make, to make it work for the business and, and for the analysts that will need this information.