What is a Data Store?

A data product gains many of its characteristics because it resides in a data store. That begs the question: What is a data store? 

Sometimes called a data marketplace, a data store facilitates the frictionless exchange of data products between data producers and data consumers. Today, most data marketplaces are external, designed for data syndicators who seek to monetize their data assets. What doesn’t exist today are internal data marketplaces that facilitate data sharing among departments and divisions in a frictionless, automated manner. (See figure 1.)

A data store turns data assets into data products by forcing data producers to determine in advance how people are going to acquire and consume their data products. Data producers need to define access rights, subscription options, delivery options, pricing (if any), terms of usage, and terms of service. The latter two specify a reciprocal contract between data producer and consumer. (See figure 2.) 

Expect vendors in the next 2-3 years to commercialize internal data sharing platforms. Wayne expects vendors of data marketplace, data catalog, data pipeline, and data platform product to take the lead here. (See figure 3.)