Over the last several months, we’ve ushered in a wave of new partnerships, the latest being MEGA International, a leading SaaS company that’s dedicated to guiding enterprises in their business transformation efforts. We recently connected with Ernie Ostic, SVP of Products at MANTA, and Frédéric Fourquet, Senior Product Marketing Manager at MEGA International, to get a deeper view into the enterprise-wide benefits of this new integration. 

Let’s start with the customer benefit. What is the significance of integrating MANTA’s data lineage software into the MEGA HOPEX platform?

Ernie: The key here is in looking at the value proposition that MANTA brings together into the HOPEX platform. By bringing together these two best-of-breed solutions, we’re delivering end-to-end automated lineage – not just for narrow aspects of cloud scenarios – that our mutual customers need for their complex technology portfolios. We’re very happy to complement the HOPEX solution for that purpose. Automation allows the end-to-end, deep lineage to be surfaced for the governance functionality that HOPEX brings to the table. 

How does the partnership enrich MEGA’s data governance capabilities to ensure that users have access to the full scope of their pipelines? 

Frédéric: MEGA provides a “connected data governance” solution on a single platform with several components: data discovery, data cataloging, and business glossaries. We’re also able to connect with strategic initiatives such as Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Modeling (BPM), Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). We were already providing some business-level data lineage, but it was manual. The fact is, for advanced enterprise companies, there is a need to work on a topic automatically. That’s why we chose to partner with MANTA – to deliver the best lineage possible and, ultimately, enhance our global value proposition. 

 Ernie: One of the most critical ways that our partnership benefits the user community – and gives them access to the complete scope of their pipelines – is by bringing a greater number of people together. We can positively impact an enormous number of business users by driving connections between technical and business users. Now, users can seamlessly move from a conceptual, business process modeling point of view (delivered by HOPEX) and drill down to satisfy what’s happening in the low-level code (delivered by MANTA). 

 Frédéric: Data is not static; it has a life cycle. With our partnership, it can be seen from a business process point of view in HOPEX, and it can be seen as technical data flows in MANTA. The goal is to reconcile these two vantage points – for users to see what is happening at both the technical and business levels – and offer a deeper view. The ability to have both views is beneficial for the regulator as well. A regulator wants to know if you’re understanding what you’re doing at the business and technical levels. It’s the best of both worlds. 

The ability to offer a deeper, holistic view is the perfect segue to our next question. Tell us how the integration of data lineage into the HOPEX platform allows customers to make informed, data-driven business decisions.

Frédéric: We know that business users will only use data that is mastered and known from the technical standpoint. From a business standpoint, it’s data that they can fully trust. Furthermore, a key factor in data governance initiatives is using data that a business can trust. By adding technical data lineage to the solution, we give users the ability to really understand what is happening in their systems and to see what needs to be corrected for data to be trusted by everyone. 

 At MEGA, we are also evolving and nurturing data stewards within the HOPEX platform. Data stewards are integral to the management of a data cycle. They do this manually, which may take considerable time and effort. But many of these tasks can and need to be automated for the customer – especially in old systems (like COBOL) with structured data, or new systems with big data. With data systems, you have to understand what was done in the development. It’s the ability to deal with the full company IT diversity (by seamlessly working with an old system and a brand-new system) that allows innovation. 

 By nurturing our data stewards, they can reap greater benefits from automated data lineage and trust what they get from MANTA. They can see what is going on in the systems and they can model the business data lineage and link to the data catalog and business glossary. That’s really important for adapting to changes. With MANTA, they can come back after some time and actually see differences; they can follow what is going on in the systems and how the data lifecycle can be enhanced in systems for data stewards. 

In closing, can you tell us about any additional differentiators or benefits to our enterprise customers?

 Ernie: We’ve seen an increased interest in using MANTA to outline lineage for solutions that don’t have an automated function, and for abstract lineage conditions. For example, some people still use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and not with a script. How do you capture that for lineage when there’s nothing to analyze? It has to be captured somehow. Once that lineage is captured in MANTA, it can be made available and surfaced through HOPEX.

 Another example – this one in the realm of legacy systems – is Easytrieve, on the mainframe. It’s a report generator that’s been around for over thirty years. Being able to capture that lineage and do so easily (for a technical user), but also make sure that it feeds up through the governance platform, is possible because of our integration. So, whether it was deeply automated code analysis like COBOL, or an ETL tool, it still needs to be captured and surfaced.  

 Finally, another area is for laying out future lineage – lineage that hasn’t been designed yet. Our integration gives users the ability to design where their lineage is going to flow, where it might integrate with a physical or logical model that’s been designed, but for which there is yet no actual code. The combination of MANTA and HOPEX to allow people to plan their lineage, for systems that are planned but not written or won’t be written until the end of 2024, is also an important and unique benefit for our mutual customers!

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