Synabi D-QUANTUM
Founded in 2016, Synabi is a German technology and service provider with headquarters in Munich. The company currently has around 50 employees and operates mainly in the DACH region. Originally a spin-off of a consulting company, Synabi started out with customers in the banking sector before branching out into other industries. The company currently offers a data governance solution, business and technical consulting, and educational services.
D-QUANTUM is a data catalog and business glossary solution used by both IT and business users. It was initially developed as project solution and then brought to the next level as a highly configurable tool that grows with the customer. D-QUANTUM Connect is the component that connects to technical metadata sources. Coming from cataloging of technical metadata to an advanced and flexible business glossary, D-QUANTUM’s easy-to-use interface supports data governance-related use cases, providing business lineage and workflows to ensure the quality of manually curated data. Synabi also provides business and technical consulting, mainly in support of D-QUANTUM implementations and to help maximize the benefit and the time-to-value of the tool.
D-QUANTUM is a web-based data catalog with a PostgreSQL database. It is available on-premises, as a service or in hybrid scenarios. Although most customers currently operate the software on-premises, there is a growing trend towards the cloud (AWS and MS Azure). Instead of providing a comprehensive list of standard connectors, Synabi facilitates custom-built connectivity, which is requested in many projects. The basic connection to other systems is done via D-QUANTUM Connect, which supports asynchronous exchange of CSV, XML, JSON and JDBC and provides an SDK. Real-time exchange to other systems is provided via REST API. Other connectors are also available (e.g., to BI tools).
Synabi provides an open and extendable metadata model to store various technical metadata objects gathered from source systems or used by D-QUANTUM Connect. A flexible out-of-the-box business model can be adapted or redesigned by customers.
Synabi offers extensive data cataloging and data governance capabilities. Once the metadata has been read in, users can satisfy their information needs via a user-friendly interface. Extensive search functions and a business glossary enable users to search for assets by subject. For transparency of data, the solution supports impact and lineage analyses, among other things. Synabi focuses on metadata and not on real data.
The solution can be integrated with surrounding processes and tools to support direct data access if required. The platform takes care of data management and security. D-QUANTUM supports customizable role-specific and individual views on metadata (with some built-in roles, such as owner and steward), but the metadata model stays the same for all users.

User & Use Cases
Similar to last year, 95 percent of companies use D-QUANTUM as a data governance solution and 62 percent use it for data stewardship / data quality management. A little surprisingly, 23 percent (+14 percent since last year) deploy it as a data lake and 10 percent (-3 percent) use it for data virtualization. D-QUANTUM is a metadata management tool and does not store actual operational data. It is a purely metadata-based tool for cataloging, governance and data quality monitoring.
Most customers responding to this survey came from medium-sized companies. The tool is mainly used in company-wide scenarios, or at least in several divisions. The mean of 304 users is around triple last year’s figure, but this is still significantly below the overall survey average of 832. Taken with the median of 50, we can conclude that the tool is rather used mostly by a broad range of data citizens rather than specifically by data or data governance experts. Its company-wide usage and average user numbers fit the typical profiles of data governance and data stewardship use cases.
Use cases
n=39

Extend of usage in the company
n=39

Total number of users per company
n=39

Total number of developers per company
n=37

Company size (number of employees)
n=39

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BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The Data Management Survey results based on feedback from Synabi D-QUANTUM users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
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