Zaloni Unveils Mica 1.2 

Oct. 3 — Zaloni, the data lake company, announced the release of Mica 1.2, Zaloni’s self-service data preparation software for discovery, curation and governance of data in the data lake. Mica’s enterprise-wide data catalog enables business users to discover and manipulate data sets and derive business insights.

Gartner analysts, Rita Sallam, Paddy Forry, Ehtisham Zaidi, and Shubhangi Vashisth in their August 2016 Market Guide for Self-Service Data Preparation, state that self-service data preparation is critical for enterprises, “As organizations are accelerating their plans to become more agile and flexible, the need to quickly prepare, explore and garner operational insights faster has become a key imperative. These challenges have made data preparation one of the biggest roadblocks to pervasive and trusted modern analytics. Self-service data preparation addresses these challenges by accelerating the way users find, access, clean, combine, model, transform and collaborate with data in an agile yet trusted way.”

“Mica 1.2 supports Zaloni’s overarching vision for an integrated big data ecosystem, in which a central data lake ingests, stores and transforms data and can feed data back into a traditional data warehouse or visualization tools,” said Scott Gidley, Zaloni’s vice president of Product. “Mica 1.2 provides the intuitive UI and connections to applications that make it easier for more business users to do data analytics – and takes more of the day-to-day burden off of IT and development.”

Mica 1.2 builds on the solution’s user-friendly interface and integration with Zaloni’s Bedrock Data Lake Management Platform for enhanced functionality. In this release, Zaloni further expands the logical data lake. Mica already works across hybrid platforms that span on premises and cloud with support for AWS and Azure environments. In this new release there is added support for adjacent relational data stores.

Additional new functionality includes:

• Sandbox provisioning – Enables a shopping cart-like user experience for provisioning data to analysts’ and data scientists’ “tools of choice,” including external databases, applications like analytics and visualization tools, or alternative data lakes.

• Non-Hadoop connectors – Creates a single-source metadata catalog that goes beyond Hadoop to expand the “Logical Data Lake” providing field metadata and data previews from outside the data lake in adjacent relational data stores.

• Zones – Users can now partition their data lake into different zones based on data sets, processes, and policies. Mica allows administration and entity categorization based on user-defined zones.

• SSO login – Simplifies administration by integrating with existing single sign-on (SSO) solutions to allow access to the Mica platform with SSO credentials.

• Joins – Enables users to join transformed entities and quickly see and manipulate results with preview sample data; then publish to Bedrock for full processing.

• Workspace sharing – Declutters and simplifies the user experience by only showing workspaces created by or shared with a user; allows administration for Mica and LDAP users and groups.

• Search functionality & open data catalog – Allows for global search of basic metadata catalog information within the enterprise without logging in to Mica; simplifies administration and enables more users to see (at a top level) what is in the data lake.

“We want to provide more ways for more business users to discover and access data from across the enterprise. Democratizing and operationalizing data use throughout an enterprise is one of the keys to successfully deriving more value from big data,” said Ben Sharma, Zaloni’s co-founder and CEO.

Source: Zaloni