Background
Client
Alation Inc.
Challenge
Follow-the-sun team in Europe
Year
2021
Alation is a pioneering enterprise data intelligence company, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company provides a cloud-based Data Intelligence Platform that combines machine learning with human expertise to help organizations find, understand, govern, and trust their data. With over $340M in funding and a valuation exceeding $1.7 billion (as of late 2022), Alation is a leader in the data catalog space, serving over 650 enterprises, including 40% of the Fortune 100.
The ask
Alation, a Silicon Valley-based data catalog and intelligence platform startup, was scaling rapidly and building out a follow-the-sun customer success model to serve their global enterprise clients around the clock. With support hubs already established in South America and India, they needed a European partner to complete their 24/7 coverage and serve EMEA clients during regional business hours. This wasn’t a typical support team requirement—Alation needed exceptionally skilled engineers who could handle complex technical issues while maintaining excellent client-facing communication.
The profiles Alation required were unusually demanding: senior application support engineers with deep technical expertise in data platforms, SQL, and enterprise software architectures, combined with the consultative skills to guide clients through sophisticated implementations and troubleshooting. These engineers needed to represent Alation’s brand with professionalism and technical authority, essentially serving as trusted advisors to enterprise customers across Europe. Finding this rare combination of technical depth and client relationship skills made the search particularly challenging.
The solution
We began with extensive workshops with Alation’s customer success leadership to deeply understand their technical stack, client pain points, and the specific balance of technical and soft skills required. Given the complexity of the profiles, we focused our search on senior engineers in Eastern Europe who had experience in customer-facing roles within SaaS or enterprise software companies, particularly those with backgrounds in data engineering or database technologies.
Our pre-screening process went beyond technical assessments to include evaluations of communication skills, problem-solving approaches, and client empathy. We presented carefully shortlisted candidates who demonstrated both the technical chops to solve complex data platform issues and the interpersonal skills to build trust with enterprise clients. As Alation approved candidates, we handled all employment contracts, compliance documentation, and onboarding logistics. We integrated the team directly into Alation’s global customer success operations, ensuring they had full access to ticketing systems, internal documentation, and communication channels with the South American and Indian teams. Our collaboration deepened over time as Alation’s trust in our delivery grew—we expanded beyond application support engineers to also source and place administrative support staff, helping streamline their European operations more broadly. Throughout the engagement, we actively monitored team performance, facilitated regular alignment meetings with Alation’s leadership, and continuously refined our understanding of their evolving needs to support their growth trajectory.
The outcome
Our partnership enabled Alation to successfully establish their European hub and complete their follow-the-sun customer success model, delivering true 24/7 coverage for their global enterprise clients. The specialized application support team we placed became integral to Alation’s EMEA operations, handling complex technical escalations, guiding clients through implementations, and maintaining the high-touch service standards that Alation’s enterprise customers expected. Client satisfaction scores for EMEA remained consistently high, with the team resolving sophisticated data catalog and platform issues while building strong relationships with European clients.
As the partnership matured, our expanded scope to include administrative support staff further enhanced Alation’s operational efficiency, allowing their technical teams to focus on client-facing work while backend operations ran smoothly. The scalable nature of our collaboration meant that as Alation continued to grow their EMEA client base, we could quickly source and integrate additional team members to match demand. Our ongoing performance management and deep integration into Alation’s operations created a seamless extension of their team, with our placed professionals performing at the same standards as Alation’s internal staff while providing the flexibility and cost-efficiency of an outstaffing model.
