Trifacta Brings Partners Into Data Prep Fold

The market for self-service data preparation tools is having a golden moment in the sun, with analyst firms like Gartner deciding that it does, in fact, have legs to stand on its own. The health of that market is also why Trifacta today launched a formal business partner program.

With the new Wrangler Partner Program, Trifacta aims to bring a variety of types of firm into the self-service data prep fold, including system integrators, consulting firms, software vendors, and Hadoop and data warehouse platform providers.

As one of the pioneers in self-service data transformation tools, Trifacta had always anticipated the need for a partner program. “In the early going,” Trifacta CEO Adam Wilson says, “we wanted the commercial selling to be direct because it was all about maximizing the learning and making sure that we were close to every deal.

“As the market for data prep has really exploded,” he continues, “it outstripped our ability to keep up with it. It was a logical time for us to add partners into the mix, and allow them to leverage us in specific geographies, verticals, and accounts.”

Wilson envisions the Wrangler Partner Program giving Trifacta a much bigger presence in the burgeoning market for self-service data preparation and transformation tools.

“You can imagine, for a small company like Trifacta, having the force multiplier effect of partners out there that are embedding and bundling and reselling and distributing our technology really helps us to keep up with the inbound demand we’re getting for data prep and our product, especially in verticals or geographies where we don’t have a direct presence.”

The recently announced deal with Infosys is a prime example. The India-based IT services firm Infosys (NYSE: INFY) has cut a deal with Trifacta to embed the data prep technology into its Infosys Information Platform, which is being used by more than 200 customers. Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)is also embedding Trifacta’s technology into its Collaborative Advanced Analytics & Data Sharing (CAADS) platform, which is used in the government healthcare arena.

Trifacta has a slew of partners working with it out of the gate. This includes seven reseller partners, like Australian systems integrator Key Link Technologies; French services firm Openvalue; and Indian big data and BI solutions provider Quantiphi. It also has about 20 consulting partners signed up, including Irish Hadoop as a service provider Bluemetrix; Ukranian software development firm Ciklum; and French consulting firm Business & Decision.

Trifacta’s Wrangler software lets data analysts get their hands dirty with data transformations, eliminating the need for help from IT

It has no fewer than 14 technology partners, including all three Hadoop distributors; BI and visualization tools providers like Qlik (NASDAQ: QLIK), Tableau (NYSE: DATA), Zoomdata, Looker, GoodData, Arcadia Data, and AtScale. It’s also working with the likes of Alation, Alpine Data, Streamsets, and Waterline Data to provide data transformation capabilities for their customers.

“The idea now is we recognize that we’re one part of the broader analytics supply chain and we want to make sure that Trifacta fits nicely into those reference architecture and is able to help provide the end to end value that our customers ultimately want,” Wilson tells Datanami.

The launch of the program says a lot not just about the state of Trifacta, which was launched in 2012 by a small group of professors and grad students from UC Berkeley and Stanford University to commercialize the Wrangle language that was developed to help automate the preparation of data before conducting analysis. It also says quite a bit about the larger opportunity for self-service data preparation tools, which firms like Gartner not too long ago were predicting would soon be subsumed into larger BI analytic and visualization tools.

Now analyst groups like Gartner are saying that self-service data prep has emerged as a product category unto itself. That suits the likes of Trifacta and the small community of pure-play providers in this area just fine. “It’s just been really exciting for us to have been early and to have established market leadership and to have helped create this category,” Wilson says.

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