The primary use case is generally about IT people trying to manage their metadata to control what data their organization has and where it's going, as well as to manage data quality and integration. Ideally, that needs to be tied to their business outcome, but that's still quite a rare use of the product. I'm the president of our company and we are partners with Collibra.
Collibra are very good at helping organizations get a handle on controlling data and the knowledge around where the data is, its type, etc. If you don't know something, you can't protect it, so they help with that.
Their user interface is much more business friendly than anybody else's. Also, their workflows, the rules and policies on workflows, are really strong. They're very good at that. I would also say that the roles and responsibilities, their way to manage people within that process is efficient. Their GDPR module is also pretty good.
I think the connectivity with different applications could be improved so that they ingest metadata through different applications, through integration with applications. The integration with different metadata sources is not where it needs to be. The company strategy is also, honestly, infantile compared to a lot of companies. If they were to extend the GDPR, if they were to kind of anonymize that and make it more general so it could cover CCPA and a number of the other legislations around the world, that would probably be a good thing.
I've been using this solution for about six years.
The stability is good but it's only as good as the processes within your company.
The solution is scalable, it can handle large volumes of metadata.
The technical support is limited. It's high quality, but not high volume, meaning that they have some really good people, but not a ton of them. Nowadays, a lot of people are getting into tech, but they're not really experienced in the particular solutions they're dealing with. It's also potentially hard to find people for that area that are really good, because it requires different types of experience. They have to know the application, but they also have to understand how applications work, how data warehousing work, things like that. Nothing against young people, but when they've only been in the industry for a few years and don't necessarily have that experience, they may not be able to help as much as you might need.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward.
I'd say that you need to understand what your business goals are around privacy and data, before implementing Collibra. The solution is not like an RSA Archer. They're not a security and risk application, they enable security and risks through management of metadata. They're a piece of the process, but they aren't the primary piece of that process. If somebody's looking at a security and risk application, I wouldn't necessarily say that this is the solution. They should look at data governance as part of the process of managing risk, but they shouldn't look at Collibra as primarily that type of application. If you're looking for a privacy and risk application you might want to look elsewhere, not because of quality issues but based on the full feature capabilities they'd be up against. I don't think Collibra can compete on those fronts.
I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.
