Meta Integration founder and chief executive Christian Bremeau loves cars. He speaks animatedly about motor racing, is a fan of the UK TV driving show Top Gear and admires its controversial former presenter Jeremy Clarkson.
His fascination with the motor car also extends to his portrayal of Meta Integration’s newest product, MetaKarta, a metadata management tool that has been the lineage backbone of huge tech platforms like Informatica and Microsoft for decades but that is now available for direct integration into organisations’ systems.
“We have provided the engine for so long and now customers want to buy the whole car,” explains Bremeau from his home in the US where the French-American national has lived for the past three decades.
“We have basically rebranded our car,” adds Bremeau, who was among speakers at A-Team Group’s webinar “Mastering Data Lineage for Risk, Compliance, and AI Governance” on June 18.
AI Driver
MetaKarta (its name is derived from the French word for map and not, as might be expected given Bremeau’s extra-mural interests, a reference to small racing cars) was launched last year in response to demands from a number of large companies, including one global insurer. Its launch comes as the growth of artificial intelligence-based applications gobbles up ever-greater volumes of data that must be fully cleansed and standardised.
Meta Integration’s metadata harvesting and lineage technology is embedded within the business intelligence and data modelling tools of large platforms under an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) white-label delivery structure.
“We analyse the lineage within every business intelligence tool,” Bremeau boasts.
After retail giant Walmart asked Meta Integration to integrate the technology within its own stack, Bremeau decided to make it available more widely. Rechristened, MetaKarta does the same thing but within companies’ individual tech stacks, both on-premises and in the cloud.
“It is a new name, but it’s not a new technology – it’s a proven technology that has been used by the largest bank in Canada for years, the Federal Reserve and in Asia,” Bremeau explains. “A great partner, Qlik, is making it available worldwide, pretty much all the banks in the Asia area use it and the largest bank in Dubai.”
European Beginning
Bremeau’s work on metadata began more than 30 years ago in Europe where he was working on creating metadata standards, later working with government agencies and military bodies. While standards were easy to create, he said, they were difficult to implement and led to the emergence of “different variations” that made metadata management across enterprises difficult.
“Agreeing on a common meta model was not the way that it was going to work, so we basically pulled our sleeves up and started to work on metadata exchanges, and we called them ‘model bridges’,” he explains.
His labours were noticed by Cognos, which recognised that the future of business intelligence technology would depend on metadata. Cognos, which has since been absorbed by IBM, was the first major client to integrate the Bremeau’s model bridges, which enabled the exchange of metadata between software applications. Soon after, he developed a complementary cataloguing technology, that made put the company’s technology onto the world’s data platforms.
Channeling similar comments by Amit Walia, his counterpart at client Informatica, Bremeau says Meta Integration soon became the “Switzerland of metadata” in reference to its behind-the-scenes ubiquity. Unlike his fellow corporate leaders, though, he didn’t license his intellectual property, preferring the OEM route.
“We made it very reasonable and affordable, and it was all about equal opportunity and proportionality – not to the size of a company, but the value proposition for that particular software,” he explains. Had he gone the per-seat licensing route, he says, “we would all be retired now”.
Financial Clients
MetaKarta is now being used widely within financial services, a sector Bremeau says is benefiting greatly from advances in metadata management. Tracking capabilities are critical for compliance processes and multi-architecture support is important for banks, which have long accounted for the lion share of Meta Integration’s customers. Banks were also instrumental in convincing Meta Integration to spin off its technology into MetaKarta.
Latterly, the application of artificial intelligence within financial services he made metadata management all the more critical.
“The value of metadata and lineage to both compliance and AI in general is it connects compliance and business to IT, and banks do have a lot of compliance,” Bremeau says. “It is important for them because they need to understand where everything is coming from and where it goes.”
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