‘We strive for innovation as our software was created with disruption in mind’: Susan Cook, CEO of Zaloni

The Silicon Review

Followed by customers and employees, most companies today have started to cite data as their second most important asset. With the rise of systems, software, and devices dedicated to collecting data, there have also been tremendous advances in machine learning, AI, and tools capable of deriving valuable insights from large data sets. Such technological advances have created a data explosion, setting the tone that more data is better – if it is appropriately governed, secure, and easily accessible to data citizens. A plethora of companies took part in the data explosion to take advantage of the array of benefits from big data, like new product creation, actionable consumer profiles, and operational efficiency. Unfortunately, companies that collected massive amounts of data without the proper infrastructure to protect it, clean it, and unify it for analytics ran into many issues.

Zaloni is the infrastructure that these companies need. Arena, Zaloni’s data governance and observability platform, can connect data sources across an enterprise and apply workflow automation for data quality, classification, and preparation. “It is our mission to make data easily accessible through a self-service, augmented data catalog as it allows data scientists and analysts to leverage the data in whatever AI or analytic tools they choose,” said Susan Cook, CEO of Zaloni. The company ensures less pressure on IT and enables analytics teams to achieve better, faster outcomes. It truly removes all the friction in a well-managed data supply chain.

Zaloni’s founder and the company’s Chief Product Officer, Ben Sharma, wanted to deliver a product that could fit the various and growing needs of customers struggling with their data. At the time, the volume of data, such as custom transaction data, event data, machine-generated data, and more, grew larger and more fragmented. Traditional big data systems used to manage such amounts of data did not integrate with newer systems, making complex data environments much more challenging to manage and govern. There was no single data platform on the market that could enforce the proper governance policies, process high volumes of data, and support people needing to access such data all at once. He established Zaloni to provide a data management and data governance platform to provide the much-needed unified and global approach to data. Today, the Zaloni Arena platform enables business use cases rapidly and the creation of trusted analytics easily without the challenges of traditional tools.

We recently interviewed Susan Cook, CEO of Zaloni, to learn more about what makes the company stand out in the data management space and more. Read on for excerpts from the interview.

Q. Could you tell us about Arena? How does it help enterprises?

The Zaloni Arena platform guarantees that IT teams will be able to spend less time managing and securing data, no matter what the enterprise’s current cloud environment, vendor landscape, or IT infrastructure. As IT starts spending less time ingesting, retrieving or cleaning data, more teams will be able to experience faster time to insight and have access to trustworthy data for better, data-driven business decisions.

Q. How do you incorporate innovation into everything you do at Zaloni?

At Zaloni, we strive for innovation as our software was created with disruption in mind. We believe that our DataOps approach to data management is our unique identifier within the data management industry. How we stay relevant and up-to-date with the latest data tools, trends, and ideologies is a foundational component of our organization’s innovation culture. When working with a customer, our services come with a personable touch. Our organization’s services wing works closely with customers, providing customized solutions to their data needs and challenges. The close relationships that our team forms with our customers give Zaloni a competitive advantage to innovation as we have direct insight into market needs. The hands-on experience with our customers empowers Zaloni to innovate quickly and incorporate these innovations into Arena, allowing for data solutions that not only meet but exceed market and business needs.

Q. What differentiates you from others in the space of data management?

Zaloni takes a DataOps approach to Data Governance. Our goal is to provide full end-to-end data supply chain observability through a single unified platform. Our platform provides the capabilities data stewards need to not only create policies but enforce them to improve data quality and ensure security and compliance.

Q. What are the challenges of being in data management today? How do you tackle these challenges?

Companies today are not only dealing with exponential data growth, but they are also facing increasingly complex data technologies stacks. This can make streamlining data pipelines and standardizing data governance challenging. Zaloni helps overcome these challenges by providing a single pane of glass across your entire data ecosystem with visibility and control at every step in the data lifecycle.

Q. What does Zaloni aspire to achieve in the next few years?

At Zaloni, we are seeing a shift in our industry as companies are beginning to move away from point solutions and incorporating data governance platforms with the agility of the DataOps methodology. Additionally, the need for unified governance is much greater for those operating in hybrid and multi-cloud data ecosystems. As part of our innovation, Zaloni is committed to improving the Arena platform to support the governance needs with ML to bring automation of workflows, predict potential data leaks, and deliver the capabilities at scale:

Expand Arena integration to Databricks, a leading Data Lakehouse platform. This integration will expand our footprint on Azure and lead to new opportunities on the Google Cloud Platform.
Arena’s integration with AWS and Snowflake’s data marketplace in addition to a recommendation engine that can provide a business glossary for both 1st and 3rd party data.
Ability to classify data at scale by leveraging machine learning and providing automated governance capabilities.
To Deploy the Arena platform via Kubernetes across hybrid cloud from a single code base for high availability and rolling upgrades without impacting end users.

About the Leader

Susan Cook, CEO

Susan has decades of experience in enterprise software sales, strategy, and consulting; specializing in Data and Analytics. She started as CEO of Zaloni in November of 2019 and has led the company with a wonderful vision through tumultuous times, including COVID-19, business disruptions, and the more recent the Great resignation. Within the first nine months of Susan being at Zaloni, the company released new branding, new pricing, new messaging, new processes, and the most significant new product release in the company’s history. Despite the many challenges she has faced as Zaloni’s CEO, she has encouraged a balanced, family-friendly work environment with an innovative work culture and is committed to leading Zaloni to new heights.