Podium Data

Podium Data, established in 2014 by co-founders Paul Barth and Steve Richards, developed an enterprise data lake management platform before its acquisition by Qlik on July 24, 2018. Headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, the company positioned itself as a solution for enterprises to transform complex data lakes into accessible, self-service data marketplaces. The firm secured a total of $11.5 million in funding over two rounds, including a $9.5 million Series A in September 2016, with investors such as Converge and Dolby Family Ventures.

The company's core business involved providing a platform that automated the sourcing, cataloging, profiling, and preparation of data, making it analytics-ready for business users. This addressed a significant bottleneck in enterprise data strategies, where data lakes often became unusable due to complexity. Podium Data's platform was designed to work with a diverse data landscape, whether on-premise or in the cloud, serving large enterprise clients like TD Bank, Cigna, and Charter Communications. The business model focused on simplifying the data supply chain, enabling users without specialized skills to find, understand, and use enterprise data through features like a point-and-click data browser and a searchable data dictionary.

The platform's key features included intelligent data profiling, automated data quality checks, and robust data publishing capabilities. It offered intelligent onboarding of data from any source, applied pattern matching and metadata enrichment, and ensured security through auto-obfuscation rules for sensitive information. A significant milestone was the launch of Podium 3.0 in January 2017, which greatly expanded its data preparation and publishing functions. The acquisition by Qlik was a strategic move to integrate Podium's data management capabilities into Qlik's analytics offerings, creating a more comprehensive data hub. Following the acquisition, Podium Data's technology formed the foundation of the Qlik Data Catalyst, and its staff was integrated into Qlik's Boston-area office.

Keywords: data lake management, data preparation, data catalog, big data, data governance, self-service data, enterprise data management, data marketplace, data profiling, analytics-ready data, data quality, Qlik Data Catalyst, Paul Barth, Steve Richards, data integration, data sourcing, metadata management, data transformation, enterprise software, data analytics