Like most areas of technology, despite rapid, beneficial evolutions, many common, pain-staking challenges remain—and the space of data platforms is no different. A successful data platform—capable of efficiently collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing structured and unstructured data—is still ripe with obstacles, including integrating disparate data sources across environments, data privacy and security, access control and lineage, and more.
DBTA’s webinar, The Future of Data Platforms: Faster, Smarter, Easier, experts explored both the bright future and the nuanced complexities of modern data platforms, ultimately paving the way for increasingly scalable, cloud-native, and AI-ready solutions.
Abhi S. Visuvasam, field CTO, Reltio, unveiled a few truths about the current market: The speed of business is increasing, agentic AI is the future, and enterprises must innovate, or risk being disrupted. Each of these truths reflect a larger trend, where organizations are faced with pressures of rapid change while simultaneously having to navigate greater complexity.
“Not only are we finding that businesses are forced to have to do… [these things], [but] data platforms also have to keep up,” said Visuvasam.
To help organizations meet these demands, Reltio disrupts the data unification space, unifying, managing, and mobilizing core data for AI initiatives and beyond. Building upon and transforming master data management (MDM), Reltio’s AI-powered, cloud-native, SaaS data unification and MDM platform delivers cleansed, interoperable core data in under 50 milliseconds. With trusted, context-rich data, real-time, always-on architecture designed to be secure, scalable, and flexible, Reltio’s platform is built for AI with built-in AI, built with AI.
According to Stephane Castellani, SVP marketing, CrateDB. “In today’s world, speed and flexibility are the difference between insight and irrelevance.” Yet achieving such speed and flexibility are not without its challenges, from the explosion of real-time analytics across multiple sources and formats to AI driving new, demanding requirements.
With that in mind, “How do we bring in simplicity and speed as the whole landscape becomes more and more complex?” posed Castellani.
CrateDB, the high-performance, distributed database for real-time analytics, search, and AI, achieves such demands with:
- Cloud-native scalability and hybrid flexibility with a distributed, shared-nothing architecture and effortless horizontal and vertical scaling, deployable anywhere
- Integrated search and vector capabilities, with full-text, geospatial, and vector search in one platform, powering real-time search and analytics
- Simplified operations, including auto-indexing, dynamic schema, horizontal scaling, SQL support, and transparent cost structure based on the cluster size, not consumption
- Security, privacy, and compliance with granular role-based access controls and multifactor authentication and comprehensive data encryption, further meeting a variety of compliance regulations including ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA
- Real-time ingests and insights with a high ingest rate, columnar storage for fast analytical queries, advanced indexing of all fields, ultra-low latency, and more
Mike Nader, VP, business analytics solutions, Incorta, emphasized the importance of analytics-ready data delivery, capable of supporting multi-source, detailed data with live updates. Through the Incorta Connected Data Foundation—a broad platform that suits a variety of enterprise needs—businesses can simplify analytic data deployment. Incorta delivers analytic, business ready data from operational sources to business processes, offering schema on read, traceability, change handling, aligned analytic templates, and more.
“Our goal is to take data from operational systems of record… .process that information, and deliver it into either platforms or your business processes, whether that is an analytics process…or a downstream system,” said Nader. “Incorta’s purpose is to really become a foundation for that operational data.”
To no one’s surprise, data is ever evolving, noted Bill Creekbaum, vice president product management, Informatica. With that evolution—prompted by AI, cloud computing, augmented analytics, edge computing, and data regulations—comes complexities, where data management ultimately becomes increasingly critical for trusted data delivery. After all, “the fastest way to kill analytics is to not trust your data,” said Creekbaum.
Many enterprises look to piecemealed or hand-coded solutions to address modern data’s nuances, forcing customers to stitch together niche solutions. However, this approach is not scalable; data remains trapped in silos, trust in data diminishes, and a lack of agility and innovation halts business success.
With the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), organizations benefit from a single, expansive platform featuring integrated data and AI services that accelerates time-to-market, improves ROI, and better manages risks. Offering a cloud-native, fully integrated and interoperable architecture with a unified metadata foundation for data intelligence, a low-/no-code user experience, an expansive partner ecosystem, and powered by autonomous and augmented AI, IDMC addresses the true data needs of any modern business.
This is only a snippet of the full The Future of Data Platforms: Faster, Smarter, Easier webinar. For the full webinar, featuring more detailed explanations, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.