Case Study: Salesforce achieves trusted data discovery and governed self-service with Alation

How Alation Enables Trusted Data Discovery at Salesforce

Salesforce, the San Francisco–based cloud CRM leader that became the world’s largest enterprise software firm in 2022, faced a sprawling, siloed data landscape after rapid growth. Analysts struggled to find, trust, and collaborate on data across multiple clouds and systems, compounded by inconsistent policies, unclear ownership, and risks to security and compliance — driving the need for an enterprise-grade data catalog and a secure single place for discovery.

Salesforce deployed Alation to catalog metadata, assign owners and stewards, enforce policies, and provide ML-guided, governed self-service — also using the catalog to plan and execute its migration to Snowflake. The platform centralized Snowflake discovery and boosted trust and collaboration: today more than 4,600 users securely access data through Alation, running about 280,000 analyst queries per month.

Salesforce

Pavan Tumu

Director of Product Management