Data management platform vendor Asset Control will tomorrow unveil a new name, Alveo, which officials say better reflects changes that have taken place at the company to make it easier for business users—not just data staff—to speed up their workflows by directly accessing data in its systems.

Meaning “riverbed” in Latin, and with the tagline “Where data flows,” the Alveo branding reflects the vendor’s move from being a largely back-office function managing static reference data, to being a platform that front-office staff such as traders and analysts use to source, consume, and even perform data analytics.

“Traditionally, business users had a lot of support from IT teams, and IT was a ‘buffer’ between the business and data. We think that’s changing. Now, if business users can’t access the data they need to perform their jobs, it slows down productivity,” says Alveo CEO Mark Hepsworth. “We want to allow business users to do more around self-service data discovery and acquisition, and to integrate that data into their workflow without having to call their IT department … and we think it’s better to give users a web interface to search a database using certain criteria, because they might find what they’re looking for immediately, and also find datasets they hadn’t thought of.”

That interface—dubbed Ops360, which the vendor rolled out in March—will retain its name, but other key products will get new names as a result of the rebrand: The AC Plus core data management platform will now be known as ‘Prime,’ while its data warehouse will now be known as ‘Alpha.’

Under its self-service plans, users will be able to use data in the Alpha warehouse without impacting any upstream mastering of the data.

“We’re closing the gap between data management that validates and prepares data for use, and data analytics—those worlds are probably further removed from each other than they need to be,” Hepsworth says, adding that Alveo is working on two initiatives to support this. 

The first project will create more analytics out of the box, covering areas such as risk and data quality, and creating an environment where users can create their own analytics using Apache’s Cassandra NoSQL database and its Spark analytics framework, which integrates with programming languages commonly used for analytics and data science, like Python and R.

The vendor is also focusing on helping clients maximize the ROI from their data, to ensure that those discovery and preparation functions are performed as cost-effectively as possible. “That could mean saving on infrastructure, but also helping users understand what happens to data once it comes into their organization, who uses it, and where duplication exists … so for example, we can incorporate features that allow us to serve users’ requests for data without incurring duplicate fees,” Hepsworth says.

Another key trend Alveo is addressing is making more data available in the cloud—in part driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has made virtual infrastructure a priority for many firms.

“We’ve seen our software being used with huge volumes as clients have dealt with volatility, and cloud enables you to dial capacity up and down as needed,” Hepsworth says. “First and foremost, this will benefit clients. But with our own managed services business, we need to be able to turn that up and down. For example, we moved all our development and testing to Amazon Web Services around a year ago, so we can turn it up or down whenever we need to test with a lot of data,”