Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and User Segments
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Andrew Brust
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
The biggest obstacle that organizations face in using data to achieve mission-critical goals is the sheer variation in datasets that they encounter each day. With data stemming from multiple sources—internal and external—organizations have to contend with marked differences in data origin and location, as well as how it’s processed, modeled, and even named. Almost any use case—from artificial intelligence (AI) deployments to real-time sensor data elicited in the cloud or at the edge—necessitates correlating data across sources to achieve fast time to insight.
Traditional physical data integration methods are resource-intensive, time-consuming, delicate, and/or costly, and create silos that defy regulations and data governance. Data virtualization, on the other hand, inverts this paradigm in several ways to provide an updated data integration method for real-time insight across enterprise sources. It integrates data with a logical abstraction layer that reduces the data movement characteristic of conventional replication approaches.
Data virtualization’s core value proposition is transforming, harmonizing, and integrating a wealth of differentiated data types, and then publishing results to applications and analytics tools. This approach grants users a much-needed uniform view of data, despite differences in location and structure.
This GigaOm Radar report evaluates the top data virtualization solutions from enterprise vendors, the majority of which have made significant cloud investments, and looks at the key criteria and evaluation metrics for comparing these offerings. This information is invaluable for companies expanding their current data virtualization investments or those considering an initial foray into virtualization.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.