Your New Private Marketplace for Data Products

Data products are the foundation of data mesh and data fabric and are essential to automating data engineering by making data ready-to-use for everyone. A data product is produced by intelligently packaging data with additional features such as metadata, making data trusted, validated, packaged, and ready to use. These data products enable data consumers to create user-defined structures through low/no-code interfaces to quickly deliver user-defined data structures that are compatible with any and all apps, programs, formats and use cases.

While data products are easily used by data engineers, systems, and applications, one of the challenges has been to deliver data products to all data users, even non-technical ones, in a way that makes the data discoverable, reusable, and secure. According to Gartner, data products are becoming the backbone of automating data engineering in data mesh and data fabric, easy usage of them has become a core part of scaling any modern enterprise, and yet, “Data and analytics leaders struggle with multiple aspects of data, including optimal data utilization, data quality, data performance, data governance, data integration, and even data product creation.” Why?

Data Products

One of the primary challenges to scaling automation within enterprises is the limit of technical knowledge restricting the amount of data users are able to access, and preventing self-serve data discovery. Another is the ability to manage the growing number of data products and providing access to the data users in an easily-discoverable manner that is secure and self-service.

Nexla’s Private Marketplace for Data Products is a private marketplace that addresses this need. It runs within your organization to allow data producers and data consumers to collaborate and enable data consumers to discover, search for, and access the data they need, in the format they need it, without having to go through data engineering teams or specialists.

Nexla’s Private Marketplace for Data Products gives you control over your data, enabling you to:

• Discover data products through shopping-like interface
• View schema, status, documentation, rating & ownership of data products
• Manage data product and sharing requests

What is a data product? 

Data products are ready-to-use, logical  data entities that enable data to be shared, consumed, or delivered in any format to any destination. A data product is produced by intelligently packaging data with additional features such as metadata, making data trusted, validated, packaged, and ready to use for any data user.

Data products:

• Provide a consistent interface to all types of data files, APIs, streams, databases and data sources
• Package additional metadata, such as schema, description, and data characteristic, on top of data.
• Are created by data producers to be easily searchable and usable by data consumers.
• Encapsulate data contracts to ensure the quality throughout data processes

Data products increase collaboration by enabling data sharing among individuals, teams, and across departments. Data products bridge the gap between data producers and data consumers. For more on data products, check out this article: What is a Data Product?

The New Data Product Marketplace

Nexla’s Private Marketplaces for Data Products are private marketplaces within your organization that allows data producers and data consumers to collaborate and self-serve data. This online shopping-like interface creates a very intuitive experience for data consumers to discover, request, or search for the data they need, and then consume it, independent of format,  in any Data Warehouse, Data Lake, Stream, or API of their choice.

Nexla’s Private Marketplaces for Data Products are:

• Accessible: The Marketplace becomes a  central repository where ready-to-use data products can be stored and arranged based on domains, such as departments, groups, users, etc., while allowing data consumers to discover and reuse data products at will.
• Customizable: Nexla’s Marketplace gives you the unique ability to create one or more private marketplaces. Each marketplace can have a specific set of data products available to users, keeping data secure or sharing it across business units or organizations.
• Easy-to-use: Nexla’s intuitive, shopping-like experience allows data consumers to search, discover, and request access to data products without requiring technical knowledge or the involvement of a data engineering team.
• Secure: Control the access to both the marketplace and specific data products to ensure a secure experience, including usage tracking and audit trails to ensure compliance and maintain governance.
• Collaborative: Share, reuse, transform and send data products back and forth between team members and business units without leaving the Marketplace. This enables easy collaboration between technical and non-technical teammates, as well as across teams.

Conclusion

A data product marketplace is the next step in data democratization, and an essential part of ensuring data access at scale in any modern enterprise. Nexla’s Private Marketplace for Data Products is a step towards that, enabling cross-organizational collaboration and self-service for all data users, both producers and consumers. 

Be one of the first to play with the future of data and sign up to try the beta for yourself. Try out the intuitive user interface and seamless data product discovery experience