Measuring the real business impact of a data product marketplace

Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and Chief Data & Analytics Officers (CDAOs) face tough choices around their technology investments. With a wide range of solutions available in the market, which will deliver the real business benefits that they are looking for? Which will improve efficiency and enable AI-driven innovation?

The key to creating value is to ensure that an organization’s data is being consumed at scale, both by human employees and AI agents. This not only improves performance, but demonstrates to the board that data teams (and their budgets) are essential to business competitiveness.

Data product marketplaces underpin this greater data consumption, making data easily discoverable and usable by all through intuitive self-service. To find out exactly how this value and ROI is created, Huwise commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on the financial benefits its data product marketplace delivers.  The result? The TEI found a 474% ROI, payback in six months and $6.5 million in net benefits over three years for a 10,000 employee company.

Forrester Consulting’s TEI is built on analysis of interviews with four Huwise customers from the banking & finance, insurance, technology and energy & utilities sectors. These findings were aggregated and combined into a single composite organization with 10,000 global employees. 

The TEI is designed to highlight both tangible benefits around efficiency, time-savings and improved performance, as well as less quantifiable value a solution delivers to the organization.

Based on an intuitive, e-commerce marketplace-style experience, Huwise’s data product marketplace solution is designed to increase data consumption and value. It enables organizations and their employees to provide secure, compliant self-service access to data in the right formats to deliver understanding and usage by both humans and AI.

Forrester’s analysis demonstrates quantifiable benefits for three groups – business users, data teams, and IT.

Benefits for business users – faster, more trustworthy data access

One of the biggest barriers to increasing data use is that business users find it difficult to find the right data for their needs. They spend too much time searching for data, rather than using it in their working lives. Huwise’s intuitive, e-commerce style experience solves this issue, with AI-powered discovery helping reduce the time business users spend searching for data by half. 

Result: 50% reduction in time spent searching for data delivering $4.5 million in productivity savings 

Benefits for data teams – time reductions in data preparation and duplicate work

Data teams are under pressure to deliver more at a strategic level, but often find their time taken up by basic data management and data preparation tasks. Using Huwise leads to a 50% reduction in data preparation time, saving 3 days per month, per person. By providing a centralized source of governed data products it also leads to a 4x reduction in duplicated work, freeing up time for higher-value activities.

Result: 50% reduction in data preparation time, saving 3 days per month, per person and equating to $3.0 million in savings

Result: 4x reduction in duplicated work through data product sharing, saving 10 days per year, per data expert, saving $223,000 

Benefits for IT teams – dramatically cutting business requests for data

Without self-service access, all business requests for data are made directly to IT teams. This causes bottlenecks and prevents IT focusing on more strategic activities. Thanks to Huwise’s intuitive self-service capabilities, users can easily access the data they need independently from IT. This saves 720 hours per year, while tool consolidation cuts license costs by 50%. 

Result: 720 hours per year saved for IT, with tool consolidation cutting license costs by 50%, providing a total saving of $111,000 

Measuring the unquantifiable benefits

The report shows that Huwise delivers more than greater efficiency. It also benefits organizations in five key ways:

• Increases value from existing data investments, by finally making data in these solutions easily available to all
• Improves data literacy and builds a data-driven culture, increasing business confidence in data through an engaging, self-service interface
• Boosts organizational agility, through a single, consistent source of information
• Enables agentic AI deployment through reliable, AI-ready and contextualized information
• Simplifies deployment through a SaaS-native platform, reducing long-term operational costs compared to in-house solutions

Taken together, Forrester calculates that these benefits add up to $7.8 million for a 10,000 employee company over three years. After subtracting investment costs of $1.3 million, Huwise therefore generates $6.5 million in net benefits by making data sharing faster, simpler and more efficient.

Find out more by reading the full Forrester report here – or calculate your own ROI using our online calculator.