Anjana Data releases a new version, 3.0, which includes a new generation Business Glossary, flexible and customizable, fully integrated over Data Catalog and an evolved CORE metamodel. It also incorporates new workflow management mechanisms, dashboarding and reporting tools, AI & ML-based assistance pills and technical improvements within its whole microservices architecture.

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

Its release 3.0, which will be available from the second week of April, brings an update of improvements and additional features such as the integration of a fully flexible and customizable next generation Business Glossary integrated over Anjana Data Catalog to help build a common language and a single semantic layer across the whole organization.

The solution also integrates a new built-in BPM for validation workflows based on Activiti, giving the possibility of improving management, performance and capabilities in the automation of procedures and data governance processes.

In addition, this version 3.0 of Anjana Data includes the integration of self-service dashboarding and reporting tools that ease data governance implementation control and follow-up by the integration of open-source solutions Grafana and Hue in the technology stack.

With this launch, Anjana Data intends to continue with the unstoppable growth of the first quarter of the year, “We are very happy not only for the welcome that our vision is having in the market but also for the performance of the team which is making it possible for that vision to be materialized in the solution release after release. The feedback we are receiving from our clients is very positive and it inspires us to continue in this line”, said Mario de Francisco, CEO of Anjana Data.

Ana Melcón, Head of Product & Development, also quotes: “In Anjana Data, we are a multidisciplinary team working side by side with our customers and we are constantly setting ourselves new challenges and goals. That fact forces us to move on and keep adding new features to foster the solution coverage in order to maintain the level of innovation that the market needs”.

Next-Generation Business Glossary

Anjana Data’s Business Glossary is based on three main objects: containers, terms and relations; each one with their own flexible and customizable attributes based on dynamic generation of templates and forms. The flexibility of this design gives organizations the ability to model their semantic reality, easily managing ontologies, taxonomies and exceptions, providing a pure business vision.

This Business Glossary will be fully in-sync automatically and assisted with CORE metamodel to offer users the possibility to seamlessly perform a complete trip over data both top-down and bottom-up. With this feature in place, it will be possible to easily move from the business vision to the technical point of view and vice versa from any place in the solution by combining both worlds.

Other new features included in Anjana Data’s Business Glossary are:

• Advanced search engine and terms dictionary to easily find what you are looking for.
• Flexible roles-based governance model for terms and relations management and maintenance along with customizable validation workflows.
• Pre-defined controls to guarantee uniqueness, consistency and integrity of business terms.
• Data assets crowdsourcing in order to create actionable knowledge based on governed data.
• Alerts & notifications module is integrated in order to enhance stakeholders collaboration and interaction under an advanced UI & UX.
• Incorporation of user assistance capabilities and support for manual tasks based on advanced analytic algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for a better user experience.

New built-in BPM for validation workflows 

Processes 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 business processes described in BPMN 2.0. This integration improves the management, performance, and capabilities of approval workflows.

This version also includes basic features that cover the same capabilities included in Anjana Data v2.0 but extended to the new Business Glossary module. The incorporation of Activiti into the technology stack gives Anjana Data the possibility to easily offer extended features about validation workflows in the near future along with a new experience for workflows design, customization and management.

Additional new features in release 3.0 of Anjana Data include:

Dashboarding and reporting

An important added value in this release 3.0 of Anjana Data is the integration of the self-service dashboarding and reporting tools, Grafana and Hue, which facilitate the control and monitoring of the implementation of the Data Governance model in the Organization, from Anjana Data.

Grafana allows the user to query, visualize, alert and expose graphically the activity within Anjana Data in a simple and attractive way even in real time, being specially indicated to represent information in timelines. On the other hand, Hue, brings the best metadata (hosted in Anjana Data) querying experience in a quick and easy way with the most intelligent autocomplete capabilities, query sharing, charts, dashboards and downloading tools. All this without programming because the analysis is done dynamically by clicks & drag & drops.

These tools included in this new reporting and dashboarding module give solution users the possibility to easily create and share their own dashboards and reports from stored data in Anjana Data’s internal repositories.

Data Catalog and Data Lineage

Besides the above improvements, the new release of Anjana Data extends its CORE metamodel with additional metadata to provide greater context and insight into the data while making their governance easier. As an important improvement, taxonomies and custom metadata now may be added at field level.

In relation to data lineage features, the possibility of adding detailed functions at field-level when declaring or importing processes and instances into the metamodel is included. In this way, the option to drill-down from the object level to the field level is allowed to have a granular view of the data movement. In addition, in the extended data lineage visualization, the information regarding the users adhered to the DSAs has been widen too (Name, Role, Business Unit, …).

Back-end improvements

Finally, various improvements at the technical level have also been included to further ensure the scalability, interoperability and easy-of-use of the solution:

• Public API 3.0 with extended features and improved capabilities and administrative API 1.5 totally independent from the Public API for administration purposes.
• New Oauth based authentication that enables seamless integration with a multitude of identity management systems.
• Code refactoring for performance enhancement and software quality improvement:

• Roles and privileges management
• Dynamic indexing of objects within Data Portal
• Management of the execution steps within approval workflows

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

Additional resources: 

• For more information about Anjana Data, download our brochure.
• Check out what’s new on Linkedin and Twitter.

About Anjana Data: 

Anjana Data was founded in Madrid in 2019, as a product-oriented company to develop, support and market its own innovative and disruptive data governance solution. Anjana Data is not just a Data Governance Tool, it is the implementation of a philosophy as a result of an extensive experience in data related projects.

The year 2020 has brought for Anjana Data an evolution in terms of its functionalities and features, both technical and usability, which provide a differential value in the final objective of achieving an effective and efficient Data Governance, necessary to turn data into a strategic asset of any organization.

Following the same vision and philosophy of the collaborative approach focused on metadata, we have worked in four main ways:

• Facilitating the consumption of information by the different participants and extending the interaction capacities between them with improved usability
• To make the CORE metamodel more flexible so that it can be adapted to the needs of the organization, offering new extension and adaptation capabilities.
• Expand the configuration and maintenance capabilities of the governance model
• Technology integration with different platforms to offer end-2-end automation and increased interoperability capabilities through APIs.

Below we detail the new capabilities improvements that Anjana Data’s version 2.0 offers:

UX and UI improvements

With the premise of delivering a version that is easy to use and fulfills the function of being the central solution for data governance in an organization, Anjana Data presents improvements in the user experience and interface through substantial changes in different screens of the application such as the Data Portal, the detail views of the objects, the lineage graphs, the management of the workflows and the Administration Panel.

The Data Portal includes a more advanced and optimized search engine, dynamic filters, new more intuitive icons and more condensed information to facilitate the search and discovery of governed data assets. In addition, the solution now allows to visualize the properties of the objects with different views to adapt to the user’s consumption needs and also simplifies the process of massive loading of objects both from Excel and by automatic import making use of the available connectors or the API.

In relation to the lineage and traceability graphs, new elements are included to facilitate their interpretation, such as the representation of the users adhering to DSAs, directional arrows that indicate the direction of the data flow (datasets input >> process/instance >> datasets output) and the differentiation of related process instances with respect to the own ones for the solutions.

As for the visualization of workflows, new ways of consuming the information are also available in order to have a global vision of the requests, facilitating their follow-up and offering the possibility of having all the detail available at the click of a button.

Finally, to facilitate the configuration and administration of the solution, a new front panel is presented from which all the parameterization, management and maintenance tasks of the government model can be carried out graphically (business areas, roles, users, permissions, workflows, taxonomies, passive vs. active government, connections, parameter catalogues, tags, …).

Capabilities improvements: CORE 2.0 Metamodel

In the new version, Anjana Data’s CORE Metamodel has not only been extended with additional metadata but also offers now the possibility to modify the templates for the different objects. This allows the centralization of taxonomy management and the inclusion of new metadata over time, according to the needs of the organization.

In addition, users will be able to add specific metadata to individual objects according to their permission settings and will be able to have predefined data type catalogues for some fields based on supported technologies and formats.

Active government and dynamic lineage agnostic to technology and on new platforms natively

Being the only data governance solution that offers active government and dynamic lineage agnostic to data storage and processing technologies is not easy and, therefore, this new version of Anjana Data brings with it a new simplified architecture, specifically designed to facilitate interaction with any technology through the use of services and offering in-memory computing capabilities with unlimited horizontal scalability (yes, unlimited, Big Data style).

Similarly, to allow full interoperability and ensure quick and easy integration into any technology scenario, Anjana Data has a new optimized public API layer that is fully documented. This layer has been extended with new features to offer all the capabilities of Anjana Data to the outside world both inbound and outbound.

In addition, work has continued on native integration with different vendors and technologies such as the entire Cloudera stack (CDH and CDP), any stand-alone Hadoop cluster that uses technologies such as Sentry, HDFS, Impala, Hive, Spark 2.x, … and support for all technologies that comply with the JDBC standard (mostly relational databases, both On-Premise and Cloud).

In this way, it has been possible to evolve a solution that offers the different roles involved, a better work dynamic and optimal management of metadata that facilitates the extraction of value to the business and decision making.

The future of Anjana Data

This new version offers our customers capabilities improvements and a significant leap in quality but, of course, we are already developing the next version which will be launched in April this year. What can we find in this next version?

• New native integration capabilities with different platforms and technologies, which we will be announcing as we close the corresponding partnership agreements that we are managing.
• The new jewel in the crown, a state-of-the-art Business Glossary module, totally flexible and configurable to adapt to the semantic vision of any organization, but 100% connected to our central metamodel, offering the possibility of a complete data journey both top-down and bottom-up.
• Advanced dynamic forms for managing templates and object composition
  Redesign of some interfaces and inclusion of UX and UI improvements with the aim of making Anjana Data’s web application increasingly simple and intuitive and favouring the interaction of different types of roles and users.
• And, the icing on the cake, assistance capabilities for some functionalities, thanks to the analysis of user behaviour and the inclusion of advanced analytics algorithms in the background. That which everyone likes to call “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”.