Over the past decade, data catalogs have emerged as important pillars in the landscape of data-driven initiatives. However, many vendors on the market fall short of expectations with lengthy timelines, complex and costly projects, bureaucratic data governance models, poor user adoption rates, and low-value creation. This discrepancy extends beyond metadata management projects, reflecting a broader failure at the data management level.
Given these shortcomings, a new concept is gaining popularity, the internal marketplace, or what we call the Enterprise Data Marketplace (EDM) at Zeenea.
In this series of articles, get an excerpt from our Practical Guide to Data Mesh where we explain the value of internal data marketplaces for data product production and consumption, how an EDM supports data mesh exploitation on a larger scale, and how they go hand-in-hand with a data catalog solution:
- Facilitating data product consumption through metadata
- Setting up an enterprise-level marketplace
- Feeding the marketplace via domain-specific data catalogs
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As described in our previous article, an Enterprise Data Marketplace is a simple system in which consumers can search among the data product offerings for one or more eligible to perform a specific use case, become aware of the information related to these products, and then order them. The order materializes as access opening, physical data delivery, or even a request for data product evolution to cover the new use case.
Three main options for setting up an internal data marketplace
When establishing an internal data marketplace, organizations typically consider three primary approaches:
Develop it
This approach involves building a custom data marketplace tailored to the organization’s unique requirements. While offering the potential for a finely tuned user experience, this option often entails significant time and financial investment.
Integrate a solution from the market
Alternatively, organizations can opt for pre-existing solutions available in the market. Originally designed for data commercialization or external data exchange, these solutions can be repurposed for internal use. However, they may require customization to align with internal workflows and security standards.
Use existing systems
Some organizations choose to leverage their current infrastructure by repurposing tools such as data catalogs and corporate wikis. While this approach may offer familiarity and integration with existing workflows, it might lack the specialized features of dedicated data marketplace solutions.
The drawbacks of commercial marketplaces
Although often offering a satisfying user experience and native support for the data product concept, commercial marketplaces often have significant drawbacks: highly focused on transactional aspects (distribution, licensing, contracting, purchase or subscription, payment, etc.), they are often poorly integrated with internal data platforms and access control tools. They generally require data to be distributed by the marketplace, meaning they constitute a new infrastructure component onto which data must be transferred and shared (such a system is sometimes called a Data Sharing Platform).
Zeenea’s Enterprise Data Marketplace
In a pragmatic approach, it is not desirable to introduce a new infrastructure component to deploy a data mesh – it seems highly preferable to leverage existing capabilities as much as possible.
Therefore, at Zeenea, we’ve evolved our data discovery platform and data catalog to offer a unique solution, one that mirrors the data mesh at the metadata level to continually adapt to the organization’s evolving data platform architecture. This Enterprise Data Marketplace (EDM) integrates a cross-domain marketplace with private data catalogs tailored to each domain’s needs.
An approach that we detail in the next article of our series, made possible by what has long distinguished Zeenea and differentiates it from most other data catalogs or metadata management platform vendors: an evolving knowledge graph.
In our final article, discover how an internal data marketplace paired with domain-specific catalogs, provides a comprehensive data mesh supervision system.
The Practical Guide to Data Mesh: Setting up and Supervising an enterprise-wide Data Mesh
Written by Guillaume Bodet, co-founder & CPTO at Zeenea, our guide was designed to arm you with practical strategies for implementing data mesh in your organization, helping you:
✅ Start your data mesh journey with a focused pilot project
✅ Discover efficient methods for scaling up your data mesh
✅ Acknowledge the pivotal role an internal marketplace plays in facilitating the effective consumption of data products
✅ Learn how Zeenea emerges as a robust supervision system, orchestrating an enterprise-wide data mesh
