Alation Licenses

FSA users require direct data access for production activities. Queries are used in a wide variety of FSA activities, including budget planning, the College Scorecard, routine portfolio reporting, and responding to mandates such as the Congressional requests, CARES act and court judgements. NSLDS and EDWA conducted independent research, and both identified Alation as one of the preferred options.

The following teams collaborated on the enterprise requirements; Enterprise Architecture (EA), Next Gen Program Office (NGPO), NSLDS and EDWA collaborated on enterprise requirements. EA compared research findings and provided results in a Verification Market Research Report and conducted supplemental research to close identified gaps. This research confirmed that Alation meets more functional requirements than other possible solutions. The Alation tool offers FSA new capabilities for data and query standardization.

An existing FSA Standard (Oracle SQL Developer) is available to NSLDS analysts for basic querying capabilities at a lower cost, however the Enterprise Review Board (ERB) approved Alation as an FSA Target Standard in September 2020.