We’re thrilled to share that Cloudera has been named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave for Data Fabric Platforms. This recognition underscores its commitment to helping organizations unify, secure, and activate their data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
In this blog, we cover what a data fabric is and why it matters, what sets Cloudera apart, key capabilities of the Cloudera platform that resulted in this position as a leader, and why all of this matters for Cloudera customers.
What is a Data Fabric?
In a world where data is more distributed than ever, enterprises need a way to connect the dots across silos—from on-premises systems to public clouds and everywhere in between. That’s exactly what a data fabric enables.
A data fabric is an architectural approach that connects, manages, and governs data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This approach allows data to be accessed and used anywhere, by anyone, securely and efficiently. Instead of forcing organizations to move all their data into a single system, a data fabric creates a virtual, unified layer that integrates data from multiple sources—clouds, on-premises, streaming, and edge—into one consistent framework. It provides end-to-end visibility, lineage, governance, and access, so teams can find, trust, and use the right data in real time.
Why Data Fabric Matters Now
As organizations accelerate AI adoption and cloud transformation, they face a common challenge: data fragmentation. Data lives across multiple clouds, legacy systems, and on-premises environments—making it difficult to govern, secure, and operationalize for business impact.
A data fabric addresses this by providing an architectural layer that automates and orchestrates data management across distributed environments. It connects data from any source, applies consistent governance, and delivers unified access for analytics, AI, and real-time decision-making.
Forrester’s evaluation of the top data fabric vendors highlights the importance of this
capability as enterprises seek to implement data and AI initiatives securely and at scale—and in our opinion, Cloudera’s position as a leader in making it a reality.
According to the Forrester report, “[Cloudera’s] focus on private cloud and on-premises deployments gives it a stronghold in industries with data sovereignty or legacy system requirements.” This long-standing foundation, combined with our open hybrid cloud strategy, has helped our customers modernize data architectures without compromising control or governance.
Key Capabilities for Open Data Fabric: Where Cloudera Scored Highest
In our opinion, receiving a 5/5 score from Forrester reflects more than product maturity—it signals leadership, customer validation, and measurable differentiation. In the 2025 Forrester Wave for Data Fabric Platforms, Cloudera received the highest scores possible (5/5) in seven criteria:
End-to-End Integrated Fabric
Unified Data Catalog
Real-Time Performance and Scalability
Metadata Management
Agentic AI
Vision
Roadmap
For End-to-End Integrated Fabric, Forrester defines a score of 5 as delivering advanced data management through a comprehensive, unified management portal that spans distributed environments, with integrated metadata, governance, and policies. It also recognizes the vendor as a leading contributor to key open-source fabric components.
In Unified Data Catalog, a 5/5 score indicates the vendor provides superior support for features such as a unified and automated data catalog across multiple data fabrics, AI-powered discovery, classification and enrichment of metadata, full customization, native integration with third-party catalogs, and the ability for business users to leverage the catalog with full capabilities.
Achieving a 5/5 score in Real-Time Performance and Scalability indicates the vendor provides superior support for features such as certified hardware integration with NVIDIA GPUs, integration with SIMD, automated advanced AI/ML query tuning, automated tiered storage, add/drop resources automatically, and AI-enabled intelligent workload management, advanced horizontal scale out, dynamic sharding and balancing, automated scale-up and down.
In Metadata Management, Forrester looks for advanced, automation including end-to-end metadata discovery, tagging, and classification, AI automation (such as automated tagging of of sensitive data), comprehensive integrated metadata across distributed fabrics, and integrated support for the data product lifecycle. Cloudera’s acquisition of Octopai enhances these capabilities by delivering deep lineage and metadata intelligence across hybrid environments, supporting the full lifecycle of governed data products.
The Agentic AI criterion recognizes vendors that embed autonomous AI agents to support data fabric. To earn a 5, platforms must demonstrate AI agents that automate integration, governance, and discovery, operating collaboratively and contextually.
Forrester’s 5/5 score in the Vision and Roadmap criteria is reserved for vendors whose strategy anticipates customer needs and shapes the direction of the market, along with evidence of execution. Cloudera’s clear, open, and hybrid approach — bridging data, analytics, and AI across any environment — demonstrates a bold and differentiated vision that continues to lead the industry forward. Our investments in intelligent automation, interoperability, and agentic AI illustrate forward momentum in the roadmap.
Together, these 5/5 scores affirm its position as a trusted, future-ready data platform that unifies data, analytics, and AI across any cloud or infrastructure. The 5/5 scores in the metadata management and agentic AI criteria demonstrate how its data fabric continues to evolve to meet the needs of modern, AI-driven enterprises.
What Sets Cloudera Apart: A Strategy Built for the Future of Data and AI
At Cloudera, our mission is to make data and AI work together, seamlessly and securely, across any environment. Cloudera believes it stood out in Forrester’s evaluation for its open, hybrid-by-design architecture that enables enterprises to manage data seamlessly across on-premises and multi-cloud environments, powered by open standards and open source innovation.
The Forrester report notes that “Cloudera’s data fabric strategy tackles the challenge of fragmented data, aiming to deliver integrated governance, visibility, and secure access across hybrid and multicloud environments.”
Key elements of our strategy include:
Integrated governance and visibility: Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX) ensures that policies for access, lineage, and compliance are applied consistently across all workloads. This unified approach brings consistency and transparency across all data assets.
Metadata intelligence and lineage: Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage enables end-to-end lineage, impact analysis, and automated metadata management.
Open architecture and interoperability: Cloudera’s AI-ready architecture brings together advanced analytics, machine learning, and real-time streaming to help organizations transform raw data into actionable insight faster. Designed to work seamlessly with non-Cloudera engines, supporting flexibility and avoiding lock-in.
Intelligent automation: Our roadmap invests in agentic AI, automation, and intelligent data fabric capabilities to optimize workloads and deliver adaptive data experiences.
Trusted and proven: Our platform is proven at global scale—trusted by leading banks, telecommunications providers, and public sector organizations to power some of the world’s most data-intensive and mission-critical operations with reliability and confidence.
These advancements underscore our commitment to helping enterprises simplify complexity, ensure trust, and accelerate innovation as data becomes the foundation of AI-driven transformation.
Why Customers Should Care: Data Fabric is the Foundation for Trusted AI
As enterprises scale their AI initiatives, the importance of a unified, governed data layer cannot be overstated. AI models are only as good as the data they’re built on—and that data must be accessible, high-quality, and compliant. Once you have trusted, governed data from anywhere, you can power trusted AI everywhere.
Cloudera’s data fabric enables organizations to govern every dataset, track every lineage, and trust every prediction, ensuring responsible AI that aligns with enterprise and regulatory standards. Cloudera’s open data lakehouse extends the value of the data fabric by enabling secure analytics, machine learning, and AI on unified, high-quality data.
Together, the Cloudera Unified Data Fabric and Cloudera Open Data Lakehouse form the foundation for a modern enterprise data strategy—one that brings intelligence to every workload, user, and business decision. With Cloudera, organizations don’t just unify data—they unlock its full potential to drive innovation, resilience, and responsible AI at scale.
See the Full Evaluation
We invite you to read The Forrester Wave™: Data Fabric Platforms, Q4 2025 to see how vendors stack up and why Cloudera was named a Leader. Access the report to understand the trends shaping data fabric architectures—and how we believe Cloudera continues to lead the way.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .
