Data is growing at an exponential rate, making it increasingly complicated and confusing to manage—especially for companies with a large customer base. Zaloni’s data platform helps make sense of this chaos.
The RTP-based Zaloni is named after the East Indian word that means “arrangement of nodes in a pattern,” said CEO Ben Sharma. He came up with the idea for the company a decade ago when he identified a fundamental problem in enterprise software storage and management.
“One of the challenges I was seeing with customers when I worked at previous companies,” Sharma said, “is that they were always struggling with these large volumes of data they were generating, and how to manage and cover that data effectively for business impact.”
Zaloni’s solution is a SaaS platform—the Zaloni Data Platform—designed to organize data so it can be used more effectively, said Zaloni Vice President Amy King.
“What happens when you don’t have Zaloni,” King said, “is you have all these siloed data sources. You have developers, you have analytics people on one side, saying ‘I want this, I want that.’ It takes a ton of time, the data’s not very recent and it’s not very well-governed.”
King said the Zaloni Data Platform addresses this problem with a three-tier strategy: connect, catalog, consume. First, it connects data by collecting it from many different locations. Then, it catalogs the data and makes it available to those with permissioned access. Those with access are then able to consume the data by pulling it from the catalog and using it to better understand customers.
“What we’re seeing is great traction with our platform and what we are bringing to market because a lot of our customers are moving to the cloud,” Sharma said. “That creates another dimension of complexity for them to cover and manage data.”
In an age of data insecurity, Sharma said, Zaloni seeks to provide “proper governance, proper security, proper management of the data,” so businesses can still use data to better understand their customers without putting their privacy at risk. It uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning to automatically detect and isolate sensitive customer data and mask it before it is used for analytics.
“If you don’t have these sensitive attributes, you won’t have these breaches because you won’t have data in a way that could do damage if it falls into the wrong hands,” Sharma said.
Zaloni has partnered with a variety of large enterprise organizations in finance, health care and life sciences fields, such as Bank of America and PwC. This Wednesday and Thursday, Zaloni will be one of the 36 companies selected to present at the Venture Atlanta Conference, a venture capital conference connecting technology innovation and investment capital.
The company is looking to expand its reach in the enterprise space even more, especially in Europe, Sharma said. It also aims to develop a hosted model of the Zaloni Data Platform that can be used by more mid-market companies.
Since Zaloni launched in 2009, it has grown into an international company with almost 200 employees in offices across the world. Zaloni has offices in London, Dubai, and Assam and Bengaluru in India. Its RTP headquarters also has an international flair.
“Even in our U.S. office, we have people from all over the world,” King said. “It’s a fun group with a diverse base of interests. I think we really do bring and welcome different perspectives.”
