Matillion has been recognized by CIOReview Magazine as the recipient of “Top 20 Data Integration Solution Companies - 2018,” based on our proprietary methodology, reflecting its position in the industry. This profile has been developed by the CIOReview research and editorial team based on insights from an interview with Matthew Scullion, CEO.

Matillion
Reinventing How Businesses Get Their Data to the Cloud

Matthew Scullion, CEO

As an ever-increasing number of businesses strive to gain the kind of decision-making information that can be had from cloud data warehouses, they are seeking an answer as to how they can get their data—across all of its various forms—into a single data warehouse and ready to provide actionable insights. Matillion, the company that is quietly and powerfully solving the problem of getting on-premises data into cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, plays a critical role in transforming businesses to the cloud.

For Matillion, things began with Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) introduction of Amazon Redshift— its cloud-based Data Warehousing as a Service product—at the end of November 2012. Many business intelligence (BI) providers were quick to leverage Amazon Redshift at that time, including Matillion. “Back then, we used to deliver managed Business Intelligence as a Service to companies that needed better analytics but lacked the expertise or IT capabilities,” says Matthew Scullion, CEO, Matillion. To this end, businesses would leverage cloud platforms, primarily Amazon Redshift, to deliver fully managed BI as a Service offerings. “At that time, we were using a commercial off-the-shelf extract, transform, load (ETL) product that wasn’t purpose-built for the cloud or Amazon Redshift, which ultimately slowed us down,” says Scullion. Given this challenge, Matillion recognized an internal need to find a better method to extract data from a variety of disparate sources and perform the necessary transformations to make it actionable for analytics in Amazon Redshift.

After evaluating nearly every commercially available tool aimed at solving this problem, Scullion and his team came to a unanimous conclusion that there was no solution currently available which supported Amazon Redshift in the needed manner—and thus, recognized a massive market opportunity. As businesses with ever-increasing volumes of data were making the shift to cloud data warehousing, this need would become more and more acute. This customer pain point signaled the shift in Matillion’s journey towards offering cloud-native, warehouse-specific data management tools to help businesses make a seamless transition to the cloud.

The early observable results from first implementations were clear and powerful. According to Scullion, “Our solution cut the time required to perform extract and transform operations in half and was 100 times faster than traditional solutions when we implemented it internally.”

Unlike traditional data transformation software that have been ported to the cloud, Matillion’s products are cloud-native and purpose-built for specific data warehousing platforms

These results, along with Amazon Redshift’s rapidly scaling market adoption (at the time, AWS announced that Redshift was their fastest growing service), it solidified Scullion’s resolve to pursue this market opportunity.

With the goal of providing the speed and power that fast-growing and tech-savvy companies required to gain critical insights from their data in record time, Matillion launched their flagship data transformation product in October 2015. Today, more than 400 customers worldwide leverage the power of Matillion’s cloud-native ELT solution to get their data into cloud data warehouses—including Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake—and gain actionable business insights from it.

In a step to equip Matillion with scalability to fully capture the market opportunity, the company recently closed a $20 million Series B round of funding led by Sapphire Ventures. “This round of funding is an exciting opportunity for us to work with the fantastic teams at Sapphire Ventures and Scale Ventures Partners to meet the needs of our customers and partners, as well as, further accelerate the pace of innovation going into our products,” says Scullion.

Changing the Data Warehousing Sector

Businesses are seeing the value of Matillion as the best path to get into the cloud data warehouse. Delivered via the AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, Matillion has an ever-increasing portfolio of Fortune 500 and “born-on-the-cloud” internet customers. “Most of the enterprise data is distributed and often stored on-premise in application silos. Matillion enables the movement of data assets, via integration with those on-premise data stores, to cloud-based data warehouses,” says Scullion. Matillion solves a sophisticated data integration problem by delivering a user-friendly, almost consumer-like experience with high performance and in a pay-as-you-go cloud model. With products built specifically for Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake, Matillion allows users to transfer data from an extensive range of cloud platforms to their data warehouse of choice.

Delivering an Easy-To-Use but Powerful Tool

The simplicity of the infrastructure eliminates the complexity of trying to scale a traditional extract-transform-load (ETL) capability that would still fail to provide sufficient speed. Matillion scales the cloud data warehouse during the transformation stage, expediting the process and saving cost.

“Unlike traditional ETL software that has been deployed in the cloud, Matillion’s products are cloud-native and purpose-built for the data warehousing platforms they support,” says Scullion. Further, an intuitive user interface makes Matillion easier to learn and to use. With a 14-day free trial period and pay-as-you-go pricing, businesses gain the freedom to test the service firsthand and become convinced of the value they receive—all with very little initial investment.

"Matillion solves a sophisticated data integration problem by delivering a user-friendly, almost consumer-like experience with high performance and in a pay-as-you-go cloud model"

General Electric Water is an excellent example of a company who had previously struggled with the data inflow from their over twenty global enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations and solved their challenges with Matillion. GE needed a highly scalable data warehouse to store their data extracted since they have a massive volume of on-premises data, and made the decision to investigate Amazon Redshift rather than continue to invest in on-premises infrastructure. During the selection process, Matillion was introduced as the best option to assist GE in the complex challenge of transforming their data into Amazon Redshift. Building a proof of concept to evaluate and select a product for ERP, Matillion was pivotal in helping the organization reduce management costs and provide a solution that delivered results quickly.

Beyond the Reinvention

What sets Matillion apart is its product’s architecture, which combines high-performance data extract and transform capabilities with a user-friendly and intuitive interface with sophisticated collaboration functionalities that allow for projects to be shared and collaborated on in real time. The Matillion tool is delivered via a cloud image in a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and does not require any on-premises infrastructure, making it easy to deploy and scale in a self-serve model.

The market has voted on the value they are experiencing. Matillion stands as the highest rated data transformation service globally with a five-star rating out of five on the AWS Marketplace. Matillion is continuing efforts towards providing customers with an even greater choice of supported data warehouse solutions, allowing businesses to choose from a wider gamut of service providers according to their specific needs. “With a growing need for cloud integration tools, we see an emerging market opportunity created by a major shift from conventional to modern data integration tools, and we believe Matillion is well positioned to seize this opportunity with a great team, unique product, and customer-centric business model,” concludes Scullion.

Matillion

Matillion Announces the End of Slow, Fragmented, Expensive Data Pipelines

Friday, June 30, 2023

New Productivity Platform for Data Teams is Now Available on Snowflake and AWS:

• Unified Foundation for Data Movement, Transformation, and Orchestration

• Unlimited Scale and Massive Concurrency

• Differentiated Pricing That Ties Cost Directly to Value

DENVER and MANCHESTER, England -- Matillion, the leader in data productivity, today announced a Productivity Platform for Data Teams designed to empower the entire data team to move, transform, and orchestrate data pipelines, regardless of technical capability. The announcement was made at Snowflake's annual user conference, Snowflake Summit 2023.

Matillion is The Data Productivity Platform for Data Teams that replaces point solutions that deliver fragments of the data pipeline experience so that data teams can collaborate and deliver at scale.

According to a 2023 Survey of Data Teams, 90% of data professionals report that the volume of data work within their organization has increased in the last 12 months, with 84% saying that the workload exceeds the capacity of their data team. Almost all (99.8%) believe that the day-to-day productivity of their team could be improved. Organizations have had to resort to point solutions, leaving them unable to address the root causes of the broader productivity problem, such as:

• Inefficient data work, which is further hindered by the tradeoffs data teams are forced to make

• The lack of a unified environment where data team members of different skill levels can collaborate

• Traditional approaches to building data pipelines which result in brittle, slow, expensive data processes which carry a significant maintenance overhead.

Matillion Data Productivity Cloud empowers all practitioners, from low-code users to dbt developers, to engineer their data's movement, transformation, and orchestration at an unprecedented scale. The platform provides a best-in-class experience for data teams to collaborate via low-code and high-code frameworks that unify every workload across a cloud data infrastructure.

The platform's game-changing serverless architecture enables data teams to run data pipelines in the cloud at unlimited speed and scale, with fine-grained control over security and governance. Users can spin up a trial and obtain value in minutes. Highlights include:

• Empowered data teams that can build using a single platform for data movement, transformation, and orchestration.

• Unlimited scale and smart cost management that harnesses cloud data platform push-down architecture using Matillion's PipelineOS: game-changing microservice agents that execute data pipelines for data movement and transformation across infinite users and projects.

• Game-changing pricing based on utilization makes evaluating each data pipeline's intrinsic value easy.

• Collaborate on unlimited projects with Git integration and versioning for seamless development, test, and production environment management.

• Sophisticated visual designer with code-optional tools for data teams with mixed low and high code skills.

Strong Support for The Data Productivity Cloud

Dr. Michael Schäfers, Senior Data Engineer at TUI Hotels & Resorts: "The familiarity and ease of use that we expect from Matillion means that our data team would be able to quickly ramp up on new features in Matillion Data Productivity Cloud Platform and leverage them to collaborate more deeply. Low code data pipeline design opens up new possibilities for less technical data team members to participate. The latest version has several features we've been hoping for, and it sets our data team up for success."

Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake: "Matillion Data Productivity Cloud helps data teams to focus on speed and agility when transforming data within Snowflake, making it easier than ever before to go from raw data to actionable use cases such as data monetization throughout the business. With the ability to harness near-unlimited scalability and processing power for data loading, it has never been easier to load and transform data in a single platform."

Matillion to bring no-code AI to pipelines

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

DENVER and MANCHESTER, England, -- Data productivity provider Matillion announced its AI vision, with a range of GenAI functionality to put AI in the hands of every data practitioner, coders and non-coders alike.

The addition of a low-code/no-code graphical AI Prompt component will enable every data engineer to harness prompt engineering within LLM-enabled pipelines and materially boost productivity, whilst unlocking the infinite opportunities of unstructured data.

The model-agnostic design will allow users to choose their preferred LLM, set the right context, and drive prompts at speed and scale. Seamlessly integrating with existing systems, the technology will enable information extraction, summarization, text classification, NLP, sentiment analysis and judgment calls on any source that Matillion connects to.

With a strong emphasis on security and explainability, the solution safeguards data sovereignty, transparently articulates results and actively eliminates bias.

LLM-enabled pipeline functionality within Matillion is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2024.

Ciaran Dynes, Chief of Product at Matillion, said: "The role of the data engineer is evolving at pace. With the advent of GenAI, data engineering is about to get much more interesting.

"Matillion's core ethos is to make data more productive, and enabling users to seamlessly integrate AI into their data stack and leverage that functionality without the need for a data scientist, is doing just that.

"Whilst all eyes are on AI, BI isn't going anywhere. We believe that through the Data Productivity Cloud, we have the opportunity to democratise access to AI in the context of data pipelines to augment BI projects, and to train and consume AI models."

Addressing the data security concerns around GenAI uptake, Matillion is set to create a stack-ready AI-enabled solution that pushes down processing into cloud platforms such as Snowflake's Snowpark, allowing Python to run inside Snowflake at scale while maintaining business data sovereignty.

Matillion's GenAI feature list, to be added to its Data Productivity Cloud platform throughout the coming year, simplifies the complexities of AI adoption for data engineers. Matillion is excited to announce a planned co-pilot feature alongside highly sought-after auto-documentation capabilities.

Matillion plans to launch further AI innovation throughout 2024, including Pipeline RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). Matillion will allow integration with vector databases to supercharge LLMs with external customer knowledge and go beyond their built-in training data. This enables users to bring their business data to LLMs to achieve more personalised, accurate responses from AI with better governance.

Also, in 2024, Matillion plans to roll out graphical components that will empower data teams to build fine-tuning data pipelines, in order to adjust LLMs with specific task data. Leveraging the connectivity and transformation capabilities of Matillion, teams can prepare AI-ready data and fine-tune models to excel on specific tasks like never before.

Matillion's AI vision announcement follows the launch of the Data Productivity Cloud earlier in 2023, a unified platform to build pipelines and deliver data at unlimited scale. Matillion was minted a unicorn in 2021 with a valuation of $1.5bn, and recently opened new HQs in both Manchester, UK, and Denver, CO.

Top 20 Data Integration Solution Companies - 2018

Company
Matillion

Management
Matthew Scullion, CEO

Description
Matillion, founded in 2010, is an industry-leading data transformation solution for cloud data warehouses. It enables businesses to be truly cloud-based and data-driven. Matillion leverages the power of the cloud data warehouse to consolidate large data sets and quickly perform the necessary data transformations, thereby identify new ways to unlock the decision-making insights hidden within their data. Matillion products are some of the highest-rated across the AWS Marketplace, Google Cloud Platform, and Snowflake cloud data warehouse environments. Matillion ETL tool is cheaper, easy to use, and simpler to deploy

Matillion Reinventing How Businesses Get Their Data to the Cloud