One jumps, they all jump! The penguin effect is a cute term from crowd psychology that suggests that penguins (and humans too, apparently) wait for one “victim” to start doing something, and then they all join in. We don’t know who was first, but now they’re all in—in data lineage!

There is no doubt that the importance of data lineage has grown enormously over the past couple of years. For example, the number of searches on Google for “data lineage” has doubled in the past year, and quadrupled since 2014! Simultaneously, the term “data lineage” has been appearing in a significant number of academic papers and scholar projects each year.
We are proud to say that the longing for data lineage has been reflected in our numbers as well. The featured image is a map of every use of the MANTA Flow demo. It shows that MANTA has been attracting businesses, partners and customers on all six continents and in more than 80 countries—from Vancouver to Wellington, from Santiago de Chile to Tokyo!

Let’s take a closer look at the evidence here

We took data from the past 3 years and spread them on the map. Naturally, most of the inquiries have come from the United States—almost exactly a third of them. Second place goes to India. We can’t be surprised about that one either! There isn’t really any special trend in the statistics. It just seems that 2015 kicked-off with a couple of inquiries from Riyadh, followed by the US boom. Part of the success is, of course, thanks to our hard-working marketing team (side note: this article was written by its hardest-working member), but we would have to do a really in-depth analysis to find out how much.

All in all, out of all the 8.2K connections, more than three quarters are from 2017! We can, of course, describe this as proof of the rapidly growing popularity of MANTA and, perhaps even more importantly, of the widening of MANTA Flow’s scope—the capabilities of the product (the increasing number of technologies analyzed). Also, we can’t overlook the impact of our partnerships. 2017 was big in this sense, too.

Yes, as demonstrated by this article, data lineage has seriously caught the attention of enterprises all over the world. Now, more than ever, companies rely on having their data under control.

Do you have your data under control, or does your data control you? manta@getmanta.com.