Slicing and Dicing the Data Governance Market

If acquiring a data governance solution is on your list of things to do in 2025, you might want to take a gander at Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms, which the IT analyst group published last week. Leaders in the field include Informatica, IBM, and Collibra, but a host of up-and-coming data governance vendors are making competition in this growing and evolving field quite interesting.

The need for data governance has never been greater, particularly as companies seek to invest and grow their analytics and AI initiatives. While few companies would invest in data governance for its own sake, having one’s data in a well-governed state opens up innumerable downstream use cases, and also reduces the odds that one will run afoul of a host of new rules and regulations concerning the use of consumer data.

Data governance, as a subset of the broader data management field, is not new, but the field is changing rapidly, according to Gartner. After deploying various point products to address their data and analytics (D&A) governance requirements over the years–such as for data security, privacy management, data quality, master data management (MDM), and data and records retention–enterprises have begun looking for unified D&A governance offerings that can address a range of concerns in a holistic manner and cut down on redundancies and the need to build and maintain integrations, according to the new Magic Quadrant report, which was authored by Gartner analysts Guido De Simoni, Anurag Raj, Melody Chien, and Stephen Kennedy.

As the D&A governance needs of enterprises evolve, so too does the definition of D&A governance. Gartner defines the D&A governance market as solutions that help automate the work of setting and enforcing data policy enforcement, and it actively excludes the execution of data governance, which it leaves to data management (data management itself is also evolving thanks to the rise of data fabrics and data meshes, the Gartner analysts write).

For its September 2024 Magic Quadrant for D&A Governance solutions, Gartner looked at the offerings of 16 vendors that offer some of the core capabilities that fall under the D&A governance rubric, including: access management; active metadata; business glossary; data catalog; data classification; data dictionary; data lineage; impact analysis; information policy retention; matching, linking, and merging; model management; orchestration/automation; organization and role models; profiling; rule management; security; tag management; and workflow management (among a few others).

2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Solutions (Source: Gartner)

No single vendor checked all of Gartner’s D&A Governance boxes, but the capabilities offered by vendors are expanding as customers look for converged solutions. And in some cases, the D&A Governance solutions are blending with broader data management suites, particularly when it comes to data fabric solutions, where data governance is a definite prerequisite. At the same time, more users are interacting with D&A Governance solutions, which lends itself to a trends toward consumerization of this product category, thanks to the addition of natural language and GenAI capabilities.

Gartner divides its quadrant into four segments: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. However, there were no Challengers in this Magic Quadrant.

D&A Governance Leaders

Informatica took the top spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The analyst firm lauded Informatica and its Cloud Data Governance and Catalog offering for having “a good understanding of the D&A government platform market and an ability to adapt to market changes and disruptions.” Gartner dinged Informatica for the cloud-only approach of its flagship Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IMDC) offering.

IBM also landed in the Leaders quadrant on the strength of its IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) and watsonx offerings. Gartner liked that IBM added “key emerging technolgoies” to its D&A governance offerings, including a knowledge graph, ontology mappings, and a real-time data quality rules engine. IBM’s D&A governance capabilities are spread across multiple products, each which its own separate licensing, pricing, and integration needs, Gartner noted.

Rounding out the Leaders quadrant is Collibra, which demonstrated strong 15% year-over-year growth in revenue and 37% YoY growth in customer count (currently more than 700). Collibra has a “strong vision” when it comes to delivering end-to-end governance, Gartner says, which also noted its strong capabilities for technical and non-technical users. However, Collibra’s Data Intelligence Platform lacks data quality and observability, the analyst group says.

D&A Governance Visionaries

Atlan took home the highest spot in the Visionaries quadrant on the back of solid growth (more than 240 global customers) and win rate. The vendor is an “emerging trusted advisor” in the governance community, Gartner says. However, implementations may require technical capabilities, and policy enforcement leaves something to be desired for customers, the analyst group says.

Alation also landed in the Visionaries quadrant thanks largely to the breadth, depth, and adoption of its data catalog, for which the company was a pioneer. A collection of hundreds of data connectors and ease-of-use make it easy for data catalog users to find data, Gartner notes, but Alation lacks data quality, data observability, and MDM capabilities, where it partners with others.

Rounding out the Visionaries quadrant is Data.world, which Gartner lauded for its data catalog and governance capabilities, including features like guided idea exploration, text-to-SQL conversion, query summarization and AI-based search. Data.world has 80 customers, per Gartner, which says customers had concerns about cloud and on-prem integration and entity resolution.

D&A Governance Niche Players

With 10 vendors, the Niche Players quadrant is quite crowded.

Precisely scored the highest on the “ability to execute” axis with its Precisely Data Integrity Suite, which has 115 active customers, Gartner says. Gartner liked how the Precisely solution connects to other products, including Precisely’s own data integration, data observability, data quality and data enrichment products. It dinged the suite for lack of use of machine learning for tracking active metadata, a semantic knowledge graph, and GenAI use cases.

Alex Solutions scored the highest on the “completeness of vision” axis with its D&A Governance solution, which includes a data hub, intelligent scanners, enterprise reporting and analytics, and data lineage service, Gartner says. With just 55 customers, Australia-based Alex Solutions is still scaling operations, particularly in North America and Europe, Gartner notes.

Next up is Ataccama, which is expanding from its base in data quality and MDM into the broader D&A governance platform with its Ataccama ONE offering. With more than 260 customers, Gartner lauded the vendor for supporting cloud and on-prem deployments and a UI that can be used by data scientists as well as non-technical users. It lags competitors when it comes to data marketplace, AI model governance, private LLM integration, multilingual support, and unstructured data curation and governance, Gartner says.

Erwin by Quest is another Niche Player. The offering from Quest Software can be used as a standalone offering or used as part of the flagship erwin Data Modeler by Quest. Customers gave the erwin by Quest suite strong reviews, but Gartner notes that most customers are non-technical business users.

DataGalaxy is a French company that has 170 active customers for its DataGalaxy Knowledge Catalog and DataGalaxy Browser products. Gartner notes that setting up, enforcing, and observing D&A governance policies is “simple and intuitive.” But the company lacks some capabilities, such as data quality, monitoring, and observability, the analyst firm notes.

OvalEdge provides D&A governance capabilities to more than 200 customers, mostly in North America and Europe. The budget-friendly tool contains the basic core capabilities that most customers would expect, Gartner says, but customers expecting to find more advanced features like managing business semantics, profiling data in-flight, MDM, data pipeline monitoring, and security will be disappointed.

Ab Initio provides D&A governance capabilities in the metadata hub module of Enterprise Data Platform, a data management product used by about 2,000 customers, primarily larger firms in highly regulated fields like financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications. Gartner says Ab Initio’s D&A capabilities are “holistic and adaptive,” but the price tag can be higher because many capabilities, like data quality and active metadata/discovery, are add-ons.

Solidatus gains its entry to this Magic Quadrant largely on the strength of its data lineage tool, which is bolstered by a partnership with Microsoft. Its data lineage offering has proved capable of tackling “historically challenging lineage functionality” in financial services, healthcare, and government sectors. However, the tool can be hard for non-technical users to use, and the company lacks broader offerings in automated policy recommendation, natural-language-based rule creation, and data marketplace areas, Gartner notes.

Anjana Data was spun out of a Spanish consultancy firm in 2018 and today has about 30 customers in banking, utilities, insurance, and government sectors, Gartner says. Strong alliances with cloud partners and familiarity with regulated industries are plusses, while a reliance on external data platform for data-related tasks, a lack of entity resolution, and a lack of dedicated salespeople provide headwinds.

Global Data Excellence is a Swiss D&A governance company that caters to large companies in regulated fields like government, finance, energy, auditing, and healthcare with its Data Excellence Management System (DEMS). The company relies on semantic and linguistic AI to deliver capabilities for D&A use cases, such as using natural language for code generation, Gartner says. A small outfit, GDE suffers from a lack of customer references.

Informatica is providing a complimentary copy of the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Governance Platform to interested parties. You can access it here.

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