Syniti data governance

Syniti, owned since 2017 by private equity firm Bridge Growth Partners, has around 1,200 employees with its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. It was formerly known as Back Office Associates, and has a long history of working with SAP applications. The company has transitioned from being a mostly consulting firm to being a software company, and has a suite of data management tools covering data quality, data migration and data governance. Customers include Campbells, Nationwide Building Society, Philips and Boston Beer.

The core product is Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP). This has several elements including data migration, data quality, master data management (MDM) and data governance. The product was originally on-premise and has been gradually migrated so as to be cloud-native. At the time of writing this process is complete other than the MDM module. The data catalog is the heart of the data governance capability of SKP.  This enables the classification of business data and assign ownership of the data, but going beyond just metadata such as a business glossary. The product can handle structured data from conventional data sources but can also be used to manage data from outside this environment, for example spreadsheets or documents. The catalog allows additional documentation for such data and can be used to apply additional business controls based on policies defined in the catalog. SKP itself resides as a cloud-native product and uses a relational database, but it can access data either on-premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid configuration, and the platform has many hundreds of connectors to various databases, file systems and applications.

The approach of SKP is to start from business strategy and from this to define what data policies are needed. For example, a business strategy to improve customer satisfaction might lead to a data policy that requires the improvement of data about customers, for example ensuring that they have consistent names and addresses. Overall, Syniti has a full function data governance offering that competes against products such as Collibra and Alation. Its broad capabilities across data quality, migration and master data makes it well suited to enterprises that want to take a broad platform approach to managing their data environment.