Anjana Data announces a new version of its Data Governance solution with new functionalities, available from 15 July.

The new version of Anjana Data incorporates extended features for the Business Glossary such as the ability to create new entity types with their own attributes based on dynamic forms. Many of the enhancements are aimed at UX & UI, audit functions as well as back-end and architecture improvements; the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence for user assistance, new workflow configuration capabilities. The new version also features new native integrations.

“In this new version of Anjana Data we have focused on building on what the solution already offered, especially improving the user interface design and providing a better user experience. In parallel, we have invested a lot of time and effort in extending the native integration capabilities to offer proactive and preventative governance over data platforms such as Azure, AWS, Denodo, Snowflake, as well as Cloudera and Hadoop. Finally, we can already say that we have the first user assistance use cases based on Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning algorithms. In any case, version 4.0, which will be released at the end of September this year, is going to be a new turning point, we are at an incredible pace for a company of our characteristics”.” says Mario de Francisco, CEO of Anjana Data.

Extended features for the Business Glossary

Anjana Data aims to become one of the benchmark solutions in the world of Data Governance with a approach innovative and disruptive, bridging the worlds of business and technology and offering adaptability and flexibility capabilities hitherto not offered by any other solution, which are more than necessary in the new era of Big Data & Multi-Cloud.

That is why in this new version, Anjana Data incorporates improvements in the management of permissions and privileges in the Enterprise Glossary, based on the defined governance model. In addition, it offers the possibility of creating new types of entities with their own attributes based on dynamic forms. In this way, the organisation can create as many entity types as it wishes (i.e. metrics, reports, business rules, data quality rules, KPIs, ...).

Regarding the relationship between objects, Anjana Data includes extended attributes and can also create different types of relationships to classify them from a semantic point of view. Each object can be related to any other object not only within the Business Glossary but also to any object within the Data Catalogue. When creating the objects and defining the associated template, attributes can be set as mandatory or optional. 

UX & UI improvements

Other enhancements in the new version relate to navigation between objects throughout the user interface. In Anjana Data, an object is any element within the metamodel that contains metadata attributes.

To optimise the user experience in the Business Glossary, Anjana Data incorporates a new wizard for the creation of objects. This is especially useful as the wizard will guide the user to facilitate the creation of new objects regardless of type (any type of entity and any type of relationship) and the user will be able to choose between manual creation or import from an Excel spreadsheet based on the names of the headers without requiring a fixed structure.

Anjana Data has also introduced an improved view of each object showing in its main view the most important and recent information related to it and a new section within the object view showing all users of the object. 

AI features for user assistance

Anjana Data is advancing its AI-powered features and a new module has been integrated into the solution architecture for user support based on metadata information, data profiling techniques and user behaviour.

In this new version, the corresponding algorithms run in the background and will show recommendations to users in a non-invasive way. Algorithms for specific use cases will be released within future updates, with the first ones included in this release:

• Recommendation of business terms that may be of some interest to the user.
• Recommendation for the generation of new relations between objects within the Business Glossary.

Enhanced auditing functions and new workflow configuration capabilities

While Anjana Data has put the main focus on user experience improvements, another important part of this new version is the auditing functions. Thanks to the Minerva (based on SolR) it is now possible to see more detailed information in the internal audit logs, as well as having the possibility to select which actions should be audited and which should not. 

Thus, each time a value of any attribute changes, a snapshot of the object will be saved to allow the regeneration of an object with the corresponding values at a specific point in its history.

The new version also introduces new configuration capabilities in the validation flows through the module Hermes (based on Activiti BPM), allowing the possibility to define the triggering of parallel validation steps within a workflow configuration and the dynamic generation of validation steps depending on the type of object, the action performed and the user who has performed this action.

New native integrations

In terms of native integrations, thanks to the new plugins added to the modules Tot y Heimdal, In addition, different types of integrations have been developed between Anjana Data and the technologies used within various data platforms.

Metadata collection and import, sample data query, active governance and dynamic data lineage capture (if applicable) are now possible on the following technologies: 

• RDBMS supporting Generic JDBC 
• SAML 2.0 & OAuth based identity access management systems
• Cloud-native technologies from Microsoft Azure and AWS
• Denodo (Beta version)
• QlikSense (Beta version)
• Snowflake (Beta version)
• Confluent & Apache Kafka (Beta version)

From 15/07, Anjana Data v3.2 will be made available to users interested in discovering how Anjana Data can add value to the data strategy, changing the vision of Data Governance in an organisation. The company is also already working on a new version v4.0 (planned for the end of September 2020) which will again be a turning point in the evolution of the solution.

Anjana Data presents a new version, 3.0, which includes a new generation Business Glossary, flexible and customisable, fully integrated with the Data Catalogue and an evolved CORE metamodel. In addition, it incorporates new workflow management mechanisms, dashboard generation and reporting tools, assistance pills based on AI & ML and technical improvements throughout its microservices architecture.

Anjana Data is a unique and differential Data Governance solution, based on leading and consolidated open-source technologies, designed to help organisations in the implementation of their data strategy in the Big Data, Multi-Cloud and Data-Driven era.. 

Its 3.0 version, which will be available from the second week of April, brings with it an update of improvements and additional features such as the integration of a New Generation Business Glossary fully flexible and customisable integrated into the Anjana Data Catalogue to help build a common language and a single semantic layer across the organisation.

The solution also integrates a new BPM for the execution of validation flows based on Activiti, This will enable improved management, performance and capabilities in the automation of data governance procedures and processes.

This version 3.0 of Anjana Data also includes the integration of open source self-service tools for the generation of dashboards and reports that allow the control and monitoring of the implementation of data governance, with the integration of the following solutions Grafana y Hue.

With this launch, Anjana Data intends to continue the unstoppable growth of the first quarter of the year, “We are very pleased both with the way our vision is being received in the market and with the performance of the team that is making it possible for that vision to materialise in version after version of the solution. The feedback we are receiving from our customers is very positive and encourages us to continue in this direction, said Mario de Francisco, CEO of Anjana Data.

Ana Melcón, Development and Product Manager, also comments: “At Anjana Data we are a multidisciplinary team where we work hand in hand, constantly setting ourselves challenges and objectives that allow us to advance and add new functionalities that expand the power of the solution, and thus maintain the level of innovation that the market needs”.

New Generation Business Glossary

The Business Glossary Anjana Data is based on three main objects: containers, terms and relationships, each with flexible and customisable attributes based on the generation of dynamic forms. The flexibility of this design gives organisations the ability to model their semantic reality, easily managing ontologies, taxonomies and exceptions, providing a pure business vision.

This Business Glossary will be fully synchronised automatically and assisted with the metamodel. CORE to offer users the possibility of making a complete journey both top-down as bottom-up on the data. With this new feature, it will be possible to easily move from the business view to the technical view and vice versa from anywhere in the application, bringing the two worlds together.

Other new features of the Anjana Data Business Glossary are:

• An advanced search engine and dictionary of terms to easily find what you are looking for.
• A flexible role-based governance model for the management and maintenance of terms and relationships along with customisable validation workflows.
• Predefined controls to ensure uniqueness, consistency and completeness of glossary terms.
• Crowdsourcing of data assets to create knowledge of value based on governed data.
• Integration with the alerts and notifications module to improve collaboration and interaction of the stakeholders in the framework of an advanced user interface.
• Incorporation of user assistance capabilities and support in manual tasks based on advanced analytics algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for a better user experience.

New built-in BPM for validation flow management 

Process management becomes faster and more intuitive with Anjana Data and the integration of Activiti, an open source workflow engine written in Java that can execute the business processes described in BPMN 2.0. This integration improves management, performance and workflow validation capabilities.

This version also includes basic features covering the same capabilities included in Anjana Data v2.0 but extended to the new Business Glossary module. The addition of Activiti in Anjana Data's technology stack, gives the solution the ability to easily offer extended features on near-future workflow validation, along with a new experience for design, customisation and workflow management.

Additional new features in Anjana Data version 3.0 include:

Dashboards and reports

An important added value in this version 3.0 of Anjana Data is the integration of the tools self-service dashboarding and reporting, Grafana y Hue, The Anjana Data system, which facilitates the control and monitoring of the implementation of the Data Governance model in the organisation, from Anjana Data.

Grafana allows you to consult, visualise, alert and graphically display the platform's activity in a simple and attractive way and even in real time, being particularly suitable for representing information in timelines. On the other hand, Hue, Anjana Data, offers the best experience to query the metadata hosted in Anjana Data quickly and easily with the most intelligent auto-completions, shared queries, results graphs, dashboards and downloads. All of this without the need for programming, as the analysis is performed dynamically using functions such as clicks & drag & drops.

The tools included in this new reporting and dashboard module give users of the solution the ability to easily create and share their own dashboards and reports from data stored in Anjana Data's internal repositories.

Data catalogue and data lineage

In addition to the above enhancements, the new version of Anjana Data extends its CORE metamodel with additional metadata to provide greater context and insight into the data while facilitating data governance. As a major enhancement, taxonomies and custom metadata can now also be added at the field level.

Regarding the data lineage functionalities, it includes the possibility of adding detailed functions at field level when declaring or importing processes and instances in the metamodel. Thus, the option to perform drill-down from the object level to the field level to have a granular view of the data movement. In addition, in the extended lineage visualisation, the information of the users attached to the DSAs (Name, Role, Business Unit, ...) is also extended.

Technical improvements in the back-end

Finally, a number of technical improvements have also been addressed to further ensure the scalability, interoperability and ease of use of the solution:

• Public API 3.0 with extended functionality and enhanced capabilities and Administrative API 1.5, fully independent of the public API for performing administrative tasks.
• New Oauth-based authentication allowing seamless integration with a multitude of identity management systems.
• Code refactoring to improve software performance and quality:
  • Management of roles and permissions.
  • Dynamic indexing of objects for the Data Portal.
  • Management of workflow execution processes.

To request a demo of the Anjana Data solution click here here.

Additional resources: 

• For more information on Anjana Data, download our complete brochure.
• Check out what's new at LinkedIn y Twitter.

About Anjana Data: 

Anjana Data was founded in Madrid in 2019, as a product-oriented company founded to develop, evolve and commercialise its own innovative and disruptive Data Governance solution. Anjana Data is not just a Data Governance tool, it is the implementation of a philosophy resulting from extensive experience in data related projects.