Silwood Technology’s product, Safyr enables customers with SAP and other complex ERP packages to include their metadata in enterprise Data Governance and Analytics transformation platforms easily.
Silwood Technology, the leading provider of specialist ERP metadata discovery software for large complex applications has been included as a Vendor in Gartner Inc’s Market Guide for Data and Analytics Governance Platforms which was published on 1st December 2021.

Figure 1 – Data and Analytics Governance Platform
Commercial ERP and CRM systems from vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce present users with three main challenges that must be overcome to use data in external data management projects - such as Cloud Analytics, Compliance or Master Data Management:
- The ability to find and access data. The standard database catalogues provided by these vendors do not present datasets in a business-friendly manner. This makes it very difficult to find the specific tables or columns that you may need for reporting, analysis, compliance or data quality. It is even difficult to identify how you have customised the table structure for your specific requirements
- Curating your metadata. These systems have large and complex data models that make navigation difficult. These systems are not designed to make it easy to understand and document relationships between tables and other objects.
- Using your data to support external applications. The technical metadata presented by these vendors is difficult to share with the third-party tools - such as cloud data warehouses, ETL tools, data stewardship platforms or data modelling tools that most data-centric businesses use to understand and leverage their data.
"Companies that cannot meet these challenges see their data initiatives deteriorating into a series of delays, cost overruns and under delivery," said Gary Allemann, Managing Director at Silwood Technology's African partner, Master Data Management (Pty) Ltd. "Safyr from Silwood Technology automatically discovers and presents business-friendly metadata from your critical ERP and CRM applications to accelerate your data projects."
Silwood Technology's Safyr puts the ability to liberate, curate and integrate the business-friendly metadata in ERP applications from SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle into the hands of those who need it most – data analysts, data engineers and data scientists. Using Safyr helps them to improve the business’ trust in the data, at the same time reducing the time and cost of metadata discovery.
Silwood Technology Sales and Marketing Director, Roland Bullivant commented: “For over 20 years Silwood Technology has produced high-quality software which enables enterprises to improve the business’ trust in data, accelerate delivery of data-intensive projects and reduce the time and cost of metadata discovery.” He continued; “We are delighted to have been recognised as a Vendor in this important new report from Gartner. Metadata is increasingly acknowledged as being one of the critical elements of an enterprise Data and Analytics Governance Platform and Safyr ensure that business-friendly metadata from large complex ERP applications can be incorporated into these initiatives quickly and easily.”
Gartner Disclaimer
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Silwood Technology Limited
Silwood Technology Ltd pioneered the use of specialist metadata extraction and analysis software techniques to accelerate and simplify the process of finding and provisioning metadata to solutions used for Data and Analytics Governance platforms as well as for Data Warehouse, Data Migration and Integration, Data Modelling and Architecture projects.
Silwood Technology’s partners include leading companies such as Collibra, Alation, Informatica, Solidatus, Quest Erwin, Precisely and Idera. Safyr supports Enterprise Applications including SAP ECC, SAP BW, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Learn more at https://www.masterdata.co.za/index.php/partners/about-silwood-technology
Data integrity leader achieves Snowflake Ready Technology status for its Precisely Connect data integration solution
Master Data Management partner, Precisely, the global leader in data integrity, has achieved Snowflake Ready Technology status for its Precisely Connect data integration solution. The Snowflake Ready validation recognizes Precisely Connect for aligning with Snowflake’s highest standards of best practice – meaning customers can unlock critical data held in legacy business systems more quickly while deriving maximum value from their infrastructure investments.

Data hosted on legacy systems can provide critical insights for businesses but is notoriously difficult to integrate with cloud-based platforms. By pairing Snowflake with Precisely Connect, businesses can get full access to all their data, whether from an IBM mainframe, IBM i or other business systems, and deliver it directly into Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers can make business decisions based on a complete picture of their data, ensuring accurate insights.
“Our customers rely on us to help them drive their businesses forward with best-in-class analytics and insights,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. “As a leader in data integrity, Precisely can ensure there is a foundation of complete and trusted data on which to confidently make those critical decisions.”
The move further reinforces the long-standing partnership of the companies, with Precisely’s datasets already established on the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Together the businesses help their customers daily to make more confident business decisions based upon data that has high levels of accuracy, consistency, and context.
“We are delighted to be strengthening our valued partnership with Snowflake,” said Patrick McCarthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Precisely. “Our combined capabilities help customers extend the useful life of their existing infrastructure, unlocking critical data from legacy business systems and connecting it with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. It’s a powerful combination that provides businesses with the trusted data and insights they need to fuel confident decision-making.”
Click here to learn more about the powerful combination of Snowflake and Precisely Connect.
This new course, by Columbia University Adjunct Professor, Asha Saxena, extends our eLearningCurve CIMP in Data Science curriculum.
Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems with the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. It is pervasive today in everyday life from recommendation engines to practical speech recognition, web searches to advanced GPS systems. Businesses are taking advantage of machine learning in creating advanced solutions to serve their customer segments.
Just as humans learn by example, machine learning algorithms learn by example. Machine learning allows us to both learn from the past to inform the future and give our data a voice. There are two equally important components for the successful application of machine learning: a good algorithm, and a comprehensive set of training examples that span as much of the system-of-interest parameter space as possible.
A broad introduction to Machine Learning
This course provides students with a broad introduction to machine learning and the data preparation workflow.
The course begins with a portfolio of case studies to provide an overview of what can be accomplished with machine learning. Then, the fundamental machine learning tasks and algorithms are covered. The machine learning tasks and algorithms covered include multivariate nonlinear nonparametric regression, supervised classification, unsupervised classification, and deep learning. For these machine learning tasks, it is shown how to assess the quality of the machine learning models and perform error estimation and feature engineering.
This course is geared towards data engineers, data analysts and other data management professionals interested in learning how to apply machine learning in business applications. The course will help you to understand best practices for applying machine learning.
MANTA release 3.5 includes automated lineage for Kafka and SAP HANA, enhancements to existing Snowflake and Power BI scanners, and various usability features.
Master Data Management partner, MANTA, has released version 35 of its unified lineage platform. The MANTA platform automatically scans your data environment to build a powerful map of all data flows and deliver it through a non-technical UI to give you full visibility and control of your data pipelines. Release 35 adds two modern popular, modern data sources, extends existing scanners for improved lineage, and simplify administration and access management.
"Data lineage is important to any organisation wishing to deliver trusted analytics timeously, yet it is impossible to achieve using manual methods of documentation," says Gary Allemann, MD at Master Data Management. "MANTA's track record in adding emerging sources to their already impressive list of scanners makes helps to future proof any investment made by our customers as they modernise their data landscapes."
Introducing new scanners for modern technologies
Release 35 introduces scanners for two popular new data sources:
The new scanner for Kafka includes support for StreamSets and DataStage scanners. The Kafka scanner supports metadata harvesting from the Confluent registry and the ability to define a full Kafka server and topic hierarchy with a detailed metadata definition as described by Avro and JSON Schemas.

MANTA connecting to Confluent Platform Schema Registry for extracting the schemas contained in Kafka topics.
Additionally, release 35 adds lineage scanning for SAP Hana, which includes the automated collection of dictionary metadata and external script analysis via lineage parsing for independent SQL scripts in a separate sub-directory.
Enhancements to Snowflake and Power BI scanners
Release 35 brings several improvements and enhancements to existing scanners. After including support for COPY INTO attributes in Snowflake as part of Release 34, this release brings new capabilities to the Snowflake scanner.
Most significantly, we’ve added scanning support for transformation expressions, which are recognized by MANTA Active Tags and provide visibility for business rules across the data pipeline. This gives MANTA the ability to display business tools that are part of our Snowflake investment.

MANTA support for parsing and analysis of Snowflake Transformation Expressions
Release 35 also includes an update to the MANTA Power BI Scanner complementing Microsoft’s enhancements to the Power BI Admin API. This update provides for better access to metadata, resulting in a more complete data lineage.
Enhanced Administrative capabilities
Besides these new capabilities, new scanners, and updated scanners, Release 35 includes equally important architecture changes to improve the overall support and management of the MANTA platform.
Enabled Event Notification
The MANTA Event Framework introduces event management and notification capabilities that enable communication of critical events to be more easily highlighted. The Event Framework includes built-in connectors for industry-standard notification methodologies to, for example, notify anaytics teams when new lineage metadata becomes available, or to notify support staff if a scan fails for some reason.

MANTA Event Framework
Integrated Keycloak Identity Management Solution
MANTA's Keycloak Identity Management Solution provides for improved security capabilities and enterprise-level support for user management, including single sign-on (SSO) for one user-ID access to all functions, enhanced user account management, active directory, and SAML integration.
Choice in Configuration Settings for Simplified Upgrade Process
Release 35 introduces changes to how site-specific settings and configurations for MANTA Flow are managed. User-set values have been separated from product-default settings. This choice of a user-set or product-based configuration simplifies future MANTA upgrades as well as backups and migration of the configuration across environments.
Master Data Management partner, eLearningCurve.com has launched a new course on Data Ethics and responsible AI, extending our data governance curriculum.
The 3-hour course, by Diana Ascher, PhD, MBA is developed in partnership with the EDM Council and delves into the importance of data ethics & responsible AI in data management organizations. It identifies basic ethical principles pertaining to data and describes how these arise from three general ethical frameworks. Participants will consider the data ethics implications of several case studies and current events. Participants will learn how to recognize the data ethics aspects of the DCAM framework for application in real-world situations.
You will learn:
• What data ethics really means
• The many forces driving urgency of data ethics
• The benefits and harms that can result from data
• The risks of data breaches
• The importance of trust and how it is created
• How data ethics integrates into the 8 components of DCAM
• The very strong relationships of data ethics and data governance
• Three steps toward data ethics actualization
Diana Ascher is the director of the IS Lab at UCLA and founder of the Information Ethics & Equity Institute, which bridges information studies research and praxis through accredited programming for data and information workers.
As Senior Advisor on Data Ethics & Responsible AI to the EDM Council, Dr. Ascher helps ensure the world’s leading organizations develop ethical data management policies and practices.
For a more detailed overview of the course please vist https://ecm.elearningcurve.com/Data_Ethics_Responsible_AI_Fundamentals_p/dg-12-a.htm