Soda Cloud Self-Serve Launches to Unite Data Consumers and Producers with Data Quality Agreements

BRUSSELS, Oct. 27, 2022 –– Soda, the provider of open-source data reliability tools and cloud data quality platform, has today released a new set of self-serve features and capabilities for Soda Cloud that unites data consumers and data producers to ensure that the data being produced is both useful and trustworthy. Built to empower the data consumers who are creating new products using data, and the teams responsible for producing data, Self-Serve enables the consumers of data to collaborate with data producers and owners to create data quality agreements that define and align expectations for the use of high-quality, reliable data, and ensures that it is always fit-for-purpose.

Finding, accessing, and using data effectively is one of the biggest challenges companies face. According to a recent BARC Future of Data Architecture Survey, data users face a number of challenges, including three common to all industries: tools that are too technical; business users who cannot implement new requirements themselves; and engineering teams that cannot react quickly enough to new requirements. Barriers to data users being able to address data quality include a lack of SQL knowledge or not having access to data sources or data pipelines, all of which often leads to bottlenecks that can cripple a data operation.

Soda Cloud Self-Serve addresses these challenges by uniting data consumers and data producers through data quality agreements, empowering them to collaborate seamlessly, regardless of technical skillset. Democratizing data in this way enables everyone to feel confident when they talk about their data needs, ensuring more data-informed decision-making and delivering data-powered experiences for customers.

Following the general availability of SodaCL, the domain-specific language (DSL) for data reliability, data consumers are now on their way to being able to fully self-serve. At the heart of the new release is data quality agreements, which enable data consumers to collaborate across a domain to ensure that data is fit for purpose. Whilst data contracts serve to define data parameters and rules at the ingestion of data, data quality agreements work at the other end of the data pipeline, creating an agreement at consumption level into how data is used in workflows. Soda Cloud Self-Serve gives data producers a way to establish a contract between stakeholders that stipulates the expected and agreed-upon state of data quality in a data source.

Further features in this new release include:

• With Soda Cloud, data consumers can easily write their own checks and run Soda Scans, with the Self-Serve function meaning that data consumers can work with data producers through a simple agreements workflow. Once checks are written, agreed, and approved, Soda Cloud takes care of the full execution process through Soda Agent, removing the need to involve engineering resources. Self-Serve removes the bottlenecks that cripple organizations by simplifying the way data domain teams work together to produce trusted data products. 
• Built using modern engineering practices such as an as-code approach and version control using Git, and using SodaCL, Soda Cloud Self-Serve enables users to test and monitor data as code across every data workload, from ingestion to transformation to production.
• Soda Cloud Self-Serve seamlessly integrates with the best-of-breed tools a data team is already using, ensuring a simpler, plug-and-play approach with the modern data stack. From email and Slack integration to ensure seamless communication and collaboration, to Jira, Opsgenie, and ServiceNow integration for incident management, as well as catalogs and Business Intelligence systems.

“Whether seeking out process efficiencies or chasing operational agility, enterprise data practitioners understand the make or break nature of data quality. In fact, according to Omdia research, 33.5% of companies prioritize a strategic, joint investment in this, eclipsing all other data and analytics concerns, including fundamental expenditures such as business intelligence and data integration,” said Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst for AI Platforms, Analytics and Data Management at Omdia. “What often gets lost in this kind of prioritization, however, is the need not just for technology but for a technological approach that extends beyond the technical confines of engineering itself to encompass and empower business users. With the release of its new self-serve capabilities, Soda is reducing the load on data practitioners and consumers while improving data quality outcomes, all by putting business domain expertise front and center.” 

Launched in early 2021, Soda Cloud is the data quality platform that helps modern data teams to simplify the process to detect, triage, diagnose, and resolve data issues across the entire data product lifecycle. Relied upon by enterprises and some of the fast-growing digital brands in the world, Soda Cloud empowers everyone in an organization to get involved in data quality, from data engineers to business analysts. Soda provides the end-to-end observability and control that data teams need to establish the parameters for trusted data for business insights and analytics.

“Data teams today are crying out for a simpler way to manage their organization’s data quality in order to create a better data culture and, ultimately, to improve business processes,” said Maarten Masschelein, CEO, Soda. “To this end, we are delighted to announce the general availability of Soda Cloud Self-Serve, another big step toward unifying data teams across the data product lifecycle and empowering them to confidently use and share data. Feedback from our preview earlier this year showed users were particularly excited to be able to use Soda Cloud Self-Serve to help democratize data quality checks and promote the concept of improved data quality right across the organization. I am pleased that the Soda Cloud  Self Serve will both empower data engineers to improve the reliability of transactional automations with data, and improve wider data operations by simplifying the implementation of best-practice workflows to efficiently work with data as a team.”

About Soda

Soda is the data quality management platform that enables data teams to detect, resolve, and prevent data issues. Soda’s mission is to help organizations democratize data quality and enable everyone to work with reliable, high-quality data, with a self-serve operating model. Soda is one of the 2021 Gartner Cool Vendors in Data Management; an ‘Outperformer’ in the GigaOm Radar for Data Quality; and noted as a tool to adopt in Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar; all recognition and validation for our approach. For more information, visit soda.io.

Source: Soda