With the recent AI boom, data is being created and generated at unprecedented rates. Per the latest estimates, 402.74 million terabytes of data are created each day. This increase calls for a paradigm shift in company efficiency—quickly enabling enterprises to uncover quality insights and effective organization of this data.
According to a recent report, “Market Study: 2024 Modern Data Management & Data Fabric,” produced by Unisphere Research and Radiant Advisors and sponsored by Informatica, Denodo, and Quest, 61.3% of respondents indicated the primary focus for their company is enhancing operational efficiency. This focus aligns with the goals of advancing decision-making and automation, marking a shift toward agile, data-driven operations.
Despite general industry news headlines, improved data management to accelerate AI development follows operational efficiency and data culture priorities.
That’s not to say AI is going anywhere; in fact, out of the nearly 700 IT staff and leaders surveyed by SolarWinds, 90% said they have a positive opinion of AI. They’re investing their budgets in AI, creating new AI processes, and envisioning future use cases and benefits.
However, various issues and ethical considerations abound in terms of data security and misinformation and regarding the enforcement of regulations that reign in internal biases. Aiming for solutions that benefit humanity, rather than on transient organizational goals, is crucial for long-term success.
Though AI has been making a splash, cloud-based solutions are still as popular as ever, and its utilization continues to grow.
According to Unisphere Research, the significant interest in cloud-based environments (both centralized and decentralized) suggest a strong trend toward continued cloud adoption among businesses, highlighting the cloud’s advantages in scalability and flexibility. The substantial interest of 16% in multi-cloud strategies underscores the importance of avoiding vendor lock-in and optimizing cloud capabilities across different providers.
Additionally, architectures such as the data lake are keeping up with new technology. Continued pursuit indicates that organizations value data lakes’ flexibility to store vast amounts of unstructured data, which is essential for big data analytics and AI-driven applications.
The interest in data lakehouses reflects a trend toward combining the cost-effectiveness and scalability of data lakes with the management features of data warehouses, providing a balanced approach to handling diverse data workloads. Noteworthy percentages for real-time unified platforms, data fabric, and data mesh architectures suggest a shift toward more complex, interconnected systems that facilitate data accessibility and interoperability across different business units and applications.
With more and more data being created than ever, making the right choices among the countless options for data management and analytics solutions is a top priority for many organizations. To help organizations progress along their data-driven journeys, each year, DBTA presents the Readers’ Choice Awards, which provide the opportunity to recognize companies whose products have been selected by the experts—our readers!
Representative of the IT market itself, the categories in the competition are diverse, ranging from well-established technologies such as MultiValue and relational database systems to newer products and services for AI, DataOps, data mesh and fabric, IoT, and more.
Here, we present the top three vote-getters in each category. Congratulations to all, and thanks to everyone who submitted nominations and voted!
BEST AI SOLUTION
BEST CLOUD SOLUTION
BEST CLOUD DATABASE
BEST DATA ANALYTICS SOLUTION
BEST DATA GOVERNANCE SOLUTION
BEST DATA INTEGRATION SOLUTION
BEST DATA LAKEHOUSE SOLUTION
BEST DATA MODELING SOLUTION
BEST DATA PLATFORM
BEST DATA FABRIC SOLUTION
BEST DATA MESH SOLUTION
BEST DATA QUALITY SOLUTION
BEST DATA SECURITY SOLUTION
BEST DATA STORAGE SOLUTION
BEST DATA VIRTUALIZATION SOLUTION
BEST DATA WAREHOUSING SOLUTION
BEST DATABASE BACKUP SOLUTION
BEST DATABASE DEVELOPMENT SOLUTION
BEST DATABASE OVERALL
BEST DATABASE PERFORMANCE SOLUTION
BEST TIME-SERIES DATABASE
BEST DATAOPS SOLUTION
BEST DBA SOLUTION
BEST GRAPH DATABASE
BEST IN-MEMORY SOLUTION
BEST IoT SOLUTION
BEST MULTIVALUE DATABASE
BEST NOSQL DATABASE
BEST STREAMING SOLUTION
BEST VECTOR DATABASE
BEST DATA OBSERVABILITY SOLUTION
BEST DATA CATALOG SOLUTION