Databricks Named a Leader in Stream Processing and Cloud Data Pipelines

We are proud to announce two new analyst reports recognizing Databricks in the data engineering and data streaming space:

• IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software, 2024 (Leader)
• Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023 (Leader)

You can download the IDC report here, and the Forrester report here.

Data engineering on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform allows data practitioners to build intelligent batch and streaming data pipelines on a unified and governed platform. With Databricks, Data Engineers and their stakeholders can easily ingest, transform, and orchestrate the right data, at the right time, at any scale. Built-in data intelligence accelerates pipeline development through automated management and optimization, semantic cataloging and discovery, and natural language access - simultaneously enabling real-time GenAI and analytics use cases that drive the business forward.

With data engineering and data streaming fundamentally intertwined, we're proud to announce these reports in a joint announcement, detailed below.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Analytic Stream Processing Software, 2024

The speed of business has increased, as organizations need to respond to and make decisions based on what is happening now - not what happened yesterday, last week, or last month.

Streaming data solutions are present in all major geographies around the world, across all major industries, and their relevance is increasing exponentially in the Age of AI. In fact, per IDC, 12 of the top 15 AI use cases across banking, manufacturing, retail, government, and utilities require real-time data.

That's why it's important to select a data platform that can handle core streaming workloads like streaming data pipelines, real-time AI, real-time analytics, and real-time applications. Top considerations for these platforms include throughput and latency requirements, use of open source, types of event-broker technologies supported, programming environments, and privacy/governance requirements.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is the best data streaming platform for real-time (or right-time) use cases and beyond. Built on serverless architecture and Spark Structured Streaming (the most popular open-source streaming engine in the world), Databricks empowers users with pipelining tools like Delta Live Tables to power real-time outcomes.

IDC gave their perspective on the data streaming space with this latest evaluation of the most significant providers in the space. Among the platforms evaluated, Databricks received the highest ranking for both current capabilities and future strategy. Databricks scored particularly well with high marks in the following categories:

• Unified experience for streaming and batch workloads
• Developer experience
• Comprehensive governance with Unity Catalog
• Technical innovation
• Partner ecosystem

You can download the full report for free here.

Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023

Organizations want simple, integrated, cost-effective, and highly automated solutions to support modern business insights. Cloud data pipelines (CDPs) help enterprises build analytics quickly, automate ingestion and data processing workflows, leverage new data sources, and support new business requirements.

Enterprises need a data pipeline solution that delivers performance at scale; makes data engineers, data scientists, data analysts, and developers more productive; supports complex use cases; and leverages new generative AI (genAI) capabilities to automate deployments.

That's why it's important to select a platform for engineering data pipelines that can:

• Deliver performance at the speed of business
• Democratize pipeline development to support multiple personas
• Orchestrate data pipelines
• Leverage GenAI to automate and accelerate development and deployment

For streaming and batch workloads alike, the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is the best place to build data pipelines for all your AI and analytics initiatives. Platform capabilities such as Delta Live Tables and Databricks Workflows, Databricks' native data orchestration tool, let data engineers and other practitioners have full control to define and manage production-ready data pipelines. Only Databricks enables trustworthy data from reliable data pipelines, optimized cost/performance, and democratized pipeline development on a unified, fully managed platform that understands your data and your business.

See why Databricks was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Pipelines, Q4 2023, including the top possible scores for Vision, Roadmap, and Partner Ecosystem.

You can read this report for free, including Forrester's take on major vendors' current offering(s), strategy, and market presence, here.

Learn more

As data teams embrace generative AI and data intelligence, they will need to embrace new models of collaboration as well. Today's data engineers must be savvy about the data science realm, and vice versa. Accordingly, we've put together a guide on connecting data engineering with data science in the era of AI. You can download it here.

And finally, we just wrapped up Data + AI Summit 2024! Sessions from the Data Engineering and Streaming track are available on-demand, including several significant announcements about the future of ingestion, transformation, streaming, and orchestration on Databricks. For a look into the future of data pipelines at Databricks, read our Databricks LakeFlow announcement here.