Actian announced the Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog, which decentralizes control of data while enabling enterprise-wide visibility and governance. The Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog, a feature of the Zeenea Data Discovery Platform, is the first new offering since Actian acquired Zeenea in September 2024 to offer a data intelligence solution enabling customers to discover, govern, and maximize the value of their data assets. 

Organizations need access to trusted data to gain insight into business conditions, drive better customer experiences, and create new products and solutions. However, traditional centralized data governance models create bottlenecks that slow innovation and decision-making. 

"For too long, organizations have been hampered by data silos and rigid governance structures, resulting in the proliferation of unconnected data pools that the rest of the business cannot leverage," said Guillaume Bodet, CPTO at Actian Zeenea. "Our Federated Data Catalog democratizes data by decentralizing governance and giving domains autonomy over their metadata, which results in deeper insights based on a broader set of organizational data."

The Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog promotes a decentralized approach to metadata management aligned with domain-oriented ownership, data as a product, self-service access, collaboration for sharing data, and consistent governance. The Federated Data Catalog also enables organizations to establish an Enterprise Data Marketplace, where data can be curated, shared, and consumed as products.

"The ability to find, access, and govern data while adhering to security controls and compliant usage policies has never been more challenging," said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. "Data catalogs, like the Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog, have become essential to data initiatives to provide awareness of available data within the guardrails of access controls, usage policies, privacy constraints, and regulatory compliance."

A decentralized approach to metadata management 

The Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog leverages a domain-oriented data management approach where the teams most familiar with the data manage their own data assets, permissions, and governance in a dedicated area of the data catalog. Domains can then publish their curated data in a shared area of the catalog for consumption by all business functions. All users - from technical experts to business users - have self-service access to discover and consume the data via the catalog's intuitive, search engine-like interface. A powerful knowledge graph provides deeper understanding of the concepts and entities, as well as the relationships between them. 

Additionally, the Federated Data Catalog establishes the foundation for an Enterprise Data Marketplace where the most valuable assets are shared. The Enterprise Data Marketplace uses an e-commerce-like experience to make data products available to other domains while still maintaining control over who can access or modify them. The common business glossary enables cross-functional teams to collaborate more effectively by aligning on shared terms and definitions.​

The Actian Zeenea Federated Data Catalog is available immediately as part of the Zeenea Data Discovery Platform.