The Next Frontier

Data marketplaces represent the fourth generation of data architectures designed to deliver data to business users for analysis, planning, and decision making.

During the 1970s and 1980s, business users consumed reports that ran canned queries directly against operational systems. In the 1990s, they used business intelligence (BI) tools to query modeled data in a data warehouse. In the 2010s, they used BI tools, APIs, and code to access, query, and transform structured and unstructured data in a data lake or data warehouse.

In this decade, business users will consume data products from any number of distributed data sources, both internal and external, including data lakes, data warehouses, and data domains organized in a data mesh. Easy access to external data will be a hallmark of the coming generation of data architectures.