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Independent technology and market research company – Forrester Research has published The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q2 2020 report. Using three high-level categories: offering, strategy, and market presence, the report has characterized and stacked up 15 enterprise data fabric vendors based on 25 touchstone assessment tools. The report can be leveraged by companies deciding on choosing the best data fabric provider for their company-wide data fabric requirements.

Enterprise Data Fabric is the new trend starting from 2020

Although Forrester had previous versions of this wave, they used to call them Big Data Fabric, but now given the focus on enterprise-wide data fabric use cases, they have decided to name it as enterprise data fabric.

Companies looking to fast-track their digital transformation process are gradually turning towards data fabric architecture for smooth and secured integration and management of their data in a hybrid cloud environment. The eminence of a data fabric architecture is in its capability to offer a single logical view of data, which is spread across the enterprise, aided by a distributed in-memory data processing engine.

Along with zero-code and low-code functionality, enterprise data fabric providers are offering AI/ML capabilities to automate data discovery, dynamic integration, and data orchestration process to support emerging use cases. Also, vendors are offering data fabric architecture with graph engine to accelerate the access of batch and real-time data streams from different sources, speeding up the data transformation process.

Vendors in Enterprise Data Fabric

Vendors are classified as leaders, strong performers, and contenders. Denodo is listed as a leader. It was also a leader in the Q2 2018 Big Data Fabric wave.

Forrester evaluated the vendors against 25 criteria that were grouped into three broad categories – current offering, strategy, and market presence – and positioned them on the wave graphic according to their scores. The analyst advised companies to evaluate vendors’ offerings based on their ability to:

  • Deliver self-service capabilities to automate data platforms
  • Leverage graph engines to identify and integrate connected data
  • Support comprehensive end-to-end data management capabilities

How Data Virtualization features in the Enterprise Data Fabric

By creating an abstraction layer, data virtualization integrates data from disparate sources, whether on-premises or cloud, to offer real-time insights for dynamic business use cases. Focusing on supporting end-to-end data management capabilities, the data fabric architecture depends on data virtualization to provide secured real-time unified view of curated data-sets through data catalog and data governance capabilities for wide-ranging enterprise-level use cases by means of quick analysis of historical and real-time data. Using AI/ ML technology, data virtualization helps data fabric with data intelligence for real-time and near real-time business insights.

Read the Complete Report

Companies looking for a holistic data management solution in a hybrid cloud architecture setting with dynamic integration, data catalog, data governance, and AI/ML capabilities should read the new Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Fabric, Q2 2020 report. This report will offer the readers a complete insight on major vendors in the market who can provide better data intelligence, self-service capabilities, wide-ranging use cases, and automated real-time data integration capabilities.

You can read the complete report here.

Ravi Shankar