Crux Extends Google Cloud Partnership with Data Catalog Integration

Data engineering and delivery company Crux Informatics is expanding its existing relationship with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by integrating its data catalog—consisting of more than 15,000 datasets sourced from more than 100 data vendors—with Google’s own data universe. 

The move will allow all GCP customers to access Crux’s datasets through the cloud offering, as Google is able to repackage and resell Crux services to its own clients. For instance, if a GCP account holder is seeking particular datasets that happen to be part of Crux’s data catalog, the GCP salesperson could immediately turn those datasets on in the GCP customer’s cloud environment even if they aren’t also Crux clients and as long as the customer has a valid license or evaluation license for any third-party vendor data they want to access. Crux can help users obtain licenses, if needed, though it wouldn’t be a party to them.

The data is delivered directly into users’ cloud environments, and specifically into BigQuery, Google’s fully managed data warehouse, so users can run analytics right away. This mode of delivery is meant to circumvent what Crux CEO Philip Brittan identifies as the main challenge in data delivery today: the data ingestion pipelines leading to datacenters that banks and asset managers have spent years creating, and in some cases, are still building.

“All the data I rely on and need is sitting in my datacenter, and the GCP account [that Google is] selling to me is empty. What am I going to do?” Brittan says. “Crux is deeply integrated into GCP, which means that any client who uses GCP as their data warehouse and uses Crux to deliver data can simply tell us, ‘Put all the data that you are delivering on our behalf into our GCP account.’”

Crux also has partnerships with GCP’s peers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake Data Warehouse. After first partnering with Google in the first half of 2019, the company announced an integration with AWS Data Exchange in late 2019, and then with Azure and Snowflake this year. However, while each integration is similar—Crux’s data appears directly within any of those cloud environments—the most recent partnership with Google marks the first time the vendor has done an integration at the data catalog level.

A Crux spokesperson says that although users do sometimes think of cloud as a monolithic entity, many kinds of environments can be constructed using a handful of different providers. Through its cloud partnerships, the overarching goal for the company is to act as a central point of ingestion and distribution for data consumers, regardless of their chosen cloud environments, they say.

Through the partnership, Crux and Google Cloud customers will also be able to use Crux’s data services, such as metadata curation, validations, and transformations. Crux will next develop further functionalities that will include schema protection and advanced validations, such as anomaly detection.