Databricks named a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for Data Lakehouses

We are proud to announce that Forrester has recognized Databricks as a Leader with the highest scores in both current offering and strategy categories in The Forrester Wave™: Data Lakehouses, Q2 2024. Forrester evaluated 13 vendors against 24 criteria.

Download a complimentary copy of the report here.

2024 Forrester Wave for Data Lakehouses

Databricks is the pioneer of the lakehouse category and we are excited to be named a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for Data Lakehouses. Databricks received the highest scores in the current offering and strategy categories with 5/5 scores in 19 criteria.

The data lakehouse is the foundation of our Data Intelligence Platform, which revolutionizes data management by using AI to deeply understand the unique semantics of your enterprise data.

Below are some of the biggest strengths of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which we believe contributed to our placement in the Forrester Wave.

Our Vision: Democratizing Data + AI

Databricks pioneered the concept of the lakehouse to combine and unify the best of data warehouses and data lakes. Today, 74% of global CIOs report having a lakehouse in their estate, and almost all of the remainder intend to have one within the next three years.

However, while lakehouse adoption has become a force in the market, our industry is innovating at an unprecedented rate, and there’s been another rapidly rising technology called Generative AI. In November 2023, we introduced the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform (DI Platform). It’s not just an incremental improvement over current data platforms, but a fundamental shift in product strategy and roadmap for our company. Our customers can democratize insights with natural language and build AI into their own data – thanks to the unification of lakehouse and generative AI.

The report’s author, Forrester’s Noel Yuhanna writes that an integrated solution, GenAI, and performance at scale matter most. He writes that “Databricks delivers a cutting-edge AI-enabled lakehouse platform at cloud scale.  [...]Databricks, the pioneer behind lakehouses, has demonstrated success in the category through ongoing commitment, steadfast focus, and continuous platform evolution. Databricks puts customers at the heart of its innovation strategy, using its strong community ties to source new features and functionality for its roadmap. Databricks has a compelling and aggressive roadmap centered on advanced GenAI/LLM, self-service, automation, data integration, data quality, multicloud, and data intelligence.”

You might be familiar with the MosaicML acquisition Databricks executed recently. We combined these two technologies to create a new category to truly democratize data and AI. We call this the Data Intelligence Platform (DI Platform), an AI-powered evolution of Databricks that opens up a whole new world of possibilities to democratize data and AI across an organization at a scale never before realized.

Databricks Data Intelligence Platform: Data and AI for all

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows your entire organization to make use of data and AI. It’s built on a lakehouse to provide an open, unified foundation for all data and governance, and is powered by a Data Intelligence Engine that understands the uniqueness of your data for all your use cases.

We have over 10,000 global customers across all industries building amazing solutions and delivering business impact with the lakehouse architecture.

Build better AI with a data-centric approach

Great models are built with great data. Databricks provides a scalable, collaborative platform that empowers ML teams to prepare and process data, streamline cross-team collaboration, and standardize the full ML lifecycle from experimentation to production, including generative AI and large language models (LLMs). Databricks Mosaic AI covers the end-to-end AI workflow to help you deploy and manage models all the way through production. The Mosaic Research Team also introduced DBRX, an open general-purpose LLM created by Databricks.

DatabricksIQ is the data intelligence engine within Databricks. It uses generative AI to simplify data and AI by understanding the unique semantics of an organization's data and how it's used. This allows both technical and non-technical users to be more productive with a self-optimizing platform while maintaining governance and controls. DatabricksIQ is integrated throughout the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to improve search and governance, accelerate development, and lower TCO.

Democratize analytics with intelligent data warehousing

In data warehousing, Databricks SQL (DB SQL) is the intelligent data warehouse. Built with DatabricksIQ, Databricks SQL democratizes analytics for technical and business users alike. The business is able to innovate fast with an intelligent and auto-optimizing platform that provides the best price/performance in the market. Additionally, as part of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Databricks SQL benefits from the simplicity, unified governance, and openness of lakehouse architecture.

Unify governance for data, analytics, and AI

Governance, security, and regulatory compliance are critical to any data-driven organization because they help guarantee that all data assets are maintained and managed securely across the enterprise. Within our platform, Databricks Unity Catalog is the industry’s first unified governance solution for data and AI. With Unity Catalog, organizations can seamlessly govern their structured and unstructured data, machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards, files, and federated databases on any cloud or platform. Our unified approach to governance accelerates data and AI initiatives while ensuring security and compliance in a simplified and responsible manner.

Collaborate with open data sharing

Data sharing has become even more important in the digital economy as enterprises want to easily and securely exchange data, AI models, apps, and solutions with their customers, partners, suppliers, and internal teams in a unified way to better collaborate and unlock value from that data. To enable this without limitations and lock-in, Delta Sharing offers collaboration and privacy-safe sharing with an open solution to securely share live data from your lakehouse to any computing platform, and with Databricks Marketplace we provide and open ecosystem for massive reach.

Build intelligent data processing for all your ETL

Data engineering on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows data practitioners to build intelligent batch and streaming data pipelines on a unified, fully managed platform. With Databricks, Data Engineers and their stakeholders can easily ingest, transform, and orchestrate the right data, at the right time, at any scale with Delta Live Tables and Databricks Workflows. Databricks was also recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™️: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023, receiving the highest possible score in the criteria of Vision, Roadmap, and Partner Ecosystem.

What’s next

The Data Intelligence Platform opens up a whole new world of possibilities to democratize data and AI across an organization. We believe our recognition as a Leader is a testament to Databricks’ success and our ability to bring together data teams and enable them to create the next generation of data and AI applications with quality, speed, and agility. We believe that AI will continue to transform data platforms and we thank our customers and partners for being on this journey with us.

Learn more

To learn more about the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, visit our website and check out our sessions and in-depth content at our Data and AI Summit and our Data Warehousing in the Era of AI virtual event. Also, follow us @Databricks for the latest news and updates.

Read the 2024 Forrester Wave for Data Lakehouses here.