Summary

The market opportunity for data providers has never been larger: investment in data teams and cloud data infrastructure has created an incredible opportunity for growth.

Selling to these data teams brings new requirements: providers that meet them by delivering data-as-a-service will capture a generational growth opportunity. Those that fail to evolve will find themselves redundant in a world of expanding data flows.

Abstract

• Data providers must now deliver their data as-a-service (DaaS): wherever their customer wants it - i.e. in any cloud or platform - quickly, securely, and reliably.
• The major cloud platforms - Amazon, Databricks, Google, Microsoft, and Snowflake - are focused on building walled gardens to drive their core business of compute and storage, rather than solving the problem of how data moves across clouds and organizations.
• This places data providers in a challenging situation: their customers are demanding data-as-a-service, but the companies driving cloud innovation - the platforms - are strongly disincentivized from helping them deliver it.
• This leaves data providers to deliver data-as-a-service on their own. Providers must essentially become data integration companies, working across multiple clouds and managing custom data pipelines. This work is expensive, slows sales efforts, requires special expertise, and diverts resources away from data product development.
• The “data sharing platform” presents a compelling new solution for providers: it enables data providers to offer data-as-a-service in any cloud or platform.
• The data sharing platform ensures that the data shared is governed and secure, and provides an essential space for collaboration between the provider and consumer.