I previously wrote about the role that data intelligence catalogs play in enabling business leaders to understand the use of data across an enterprise. I also recently wrote about the importance of treating data as a business discipline to ensure that data projects are aligned with business strategy objectives. As I noted, although many data catalog products provide enterprises with information about what data is being used across an enterprise, the provision of important metrics about how that data is being used and the value generated by data initiatives is often lacking. DataGalaxy is attempting to address this gap by combining data catalog and data governance functionality with a portfolio management perspective that enables enterprises to prioritize, monitor and measure the value delivered by data and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.
DataGalaxy was founded in 2016 by Chief Executive Officer Sebastien Thomas and Chief Product Officer Lazhar Sellami and now claims over 200 customers and more than 100 employees spread across its headquarters in Lyon, France, and offices in the USA and UK. The company offers a platform for collaborative data governance, combining data catalog, data governance, and data and AI product management and sharing capabilities. It added to these core capabilities earlier this year with the acquisition of YOOI, a fellow French software provider with a focus on enabling enterprises to take a portfolio-based approach to managing investments in data, analytics and AI. By combining this functionality with its existing collaborative data governance platform, DataGalaxy seeks to enable enterprises to better align their data management approaches with overall business strategies, while managing the cost and complexity of data initiatives by reinforcing a focus on the demonstration of value and impact. Founded in 2019, YOOI established itself by providing tools to help enterprises to identify, qualify and prioritize proposed data initiatives to ensure they remain aligned with business goals and key performance indicators and enable the measurement of costs and ROI. The latter is a key challenge for many enterprises. More than two-fifths of participants in ISG’s Data and AI Market Lens Study cited measuring ROI as a key data challenge, second only to data usability for AI.
Too many enterprises continue to treat data management as an IT problem rather than a business discipline. Although almost one-half (49%) of participants in ISG’s 2025 Market
Lens Data and AI Program Study agree that data operations should be managed separately from other parts of the IT estate, a similar proportion (47%) report that the IT department is, on average, responsible for their various data activities. One potential risk of IT-defined data strategies is that they can primarily focus on technology platforms and tools and become divorced from business objectives and key performance indicators used to measure business value.
DataGalaxy’s platform is designed to alleviate this risk by combining data governance functionality with a portfolio and value management-based approach to data projects. The product provides a “strategy cockpit” user interface through which users can organize data and AI initiatives according to business domain, objective or strategic program and score them according to key attributes, including strategic, value, effort and risk. As a result, users can manage and prioritize data initiatives in response to evolving business requirements as well as measure and monitor the value of initiatives in relation to usage, cost and realized value. This is combined with the company’s underlying data catalog functionality, which provides a platform for the governance and discovery of data assets. Key capabilities of the data catalog layer include metadata discovery, data certification, automated glossary
generation, column-level lineage, and browser-based integration with business intelligence (BI) tools and dashboards to surface data ownership and trust information. The product also provides functionality for the definition and management of business-driven data governance policies and rules, as well as lineage and impact analysis, and also internal marketplace functionality to enable the publishing, discovery and management of data and AI products. The company also offers an AI copilot, called Blink, to facilitate data discovery, data governance and analysis. I assert that through 2027, enterprises will prioritize data intelligence software providers capable of providing a holistic view of data production and data consumption across their organization.
Although DataGalaxy is well-placed to address the requirements for data intelligence and data governance initiatives, it is competing with some very large and well-established providers and could increase its scale and profile. The combination of portfolio and value management and data catalog functionality is a key differentiator, however. While almost two-thirds (63%) of software providers evaluated in the 2025 Buyers Guide for Data Management were graded at A- or above for metrics and scorecards related to data usage, less than one-half (45%) were graded at the same level for metrics on the value and ROI of data initiatives. As such, I recommend that any enterprises evaluating data intelligence providers should include DataGalaxy within their assessments.
Regards,
Matt Aslett
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