Kalido gets busy

I once wrote that everybody with an enterprise data warehouse should license Kalido. I don’t retract that statement. Not only does it help you to set up your warehouse much more quickly, it also isolates the warehouse from changes to your business environment, and provides the ability to look at the warehouse from an historic perspective (that is, what was the context of the data last year, given that we had a different corporate structure then). But the problem was that it was only available on Oracle and SQL Server platforms. Now it’s also available on Netezza. But this is just one of the announcements from Kalido over the last few months and it’s worth considering them as a whole because they tell a story about a much more aggressive approach to the market from Kalido than was previously the case.

So, what else has Kalido announced? Well, it has licensed the Netrics engine so that it can directly provide data quality processing in support of its MDM offering, instead of relying on third party vendors; it announced its KONA Information Appliance based around Netezza TwinFin and in conjunction with QlikTech, which it describes as the first warehousing appliance with data governance built-in; and, most recently, it has announced the latest version of its Kalido Information Engine, which will be available from the end of this month, where the emphasis is, once gain, on data governance.

I won’t go into the details of the Information Engine because Andy Hayler and others have described its data governance capabilities effectively, but the key features are that it supports data governance processes on the one hand and that it has an interface for business owners on the other. It is this last point that is particularly important. Kalido (not without reason) sees data governance as a function that sits between IT and the business, and which needs to support collaboration in both directions. This Kalido provides with its workflow and associated facilities. But the whole thing won’t work unless business owners can see what is going on with their data—the data that they leverage to do their jobs—and this needs to be done in such a way that the impact on the way that they normally work is minimal. Which is exactly what Kalido has done.

But back to my original point. For years Kalido effectively existed in a box of its own. Yes, it had a few partnerships but it seemed to be content there. However, the flurry of activity this year suggests that it is emerging from its self-imposed shell; that it is getting much more pro-active. And it clearly intends to stake a major claim to the data governance market in particular.

Well, all power to Kalido’s elbow: it has been a company that has been too much of a well-kept secret for too long.