Data management software investments soaring, yet few enterprises realize ROI

Enterprises are pouring money into data management software – to the tune of $73 billion in 2020 – but are seeing very little return on their data investments.

According to a study from Dremio and Wakefield Research, only 22% of the data leaders surveyed have fully realized ROI in the past two years, with 56% of data leaders having no consistent way of measuring it.

“Data leaders are frequently concerned about the out-of-control costs of data warehouses, particularly as their workloads grow – a big surprise to them since the data warehouse cost of entry can be low to start. Moreover, the lack of predictability around future costs leads to very poor financial governance for data leaders and CFOs alike,” said Billy Bosworth, CEO, Dremio.

“While companies understand they have an expensive sunk cost for data warehouses, they are keen on ways to drive newer analytics architectures directly from open data lakes for better financial governance and highly performant queries against vast amounts of data.”

Copies of data floating around

The report found that in order to run analytics, enterprises are making multiple copies of their data – 12 copies on average. A staggering 60% report that their company has over 10 copies of their data floating around.

To add insult to injury, 82% say that their end users have used inconsistent versions of the same dataset at the same time due to their extract transform and load (ETL) processes, undermining the data integrity and trust, and slowing down the decision-making process. Notably:

• Among all data leaders who use a data warehouse, 94% report concerns over it.
• 79% are concerned about scaling their architecture; only 20% report having no concerns about the cost of scaling.
• 84% of data leaders say it is normal for data analysts at their company to work with a partial data set – this means many data analysts may be working with insufficient data.
• Just 16% expect fresh data in minutes or hours; 51% expect it in terms of weeks.
• 76% of data leaders say they are locked into certain vendors due to their closed systems. This means just a quarter of companies have true freedom to explore new and innovative data tools and analytics.