Building a successful data ecosystem – advice from Gartner

Chief Data Officers (CDOs) must deliver on competing business priorities – managing a rapidly expanding supply of data while meeting rising demand for more usable data that is both human and AI-ready. Underpinning both of these objectives they need to deliver a return on their investments in technology, people and infrastructure.

Yet, they face a key challenge from their existing, complex tech stacks that add to costs, reduce agility and prevent them focusing on their priorities.

To overcome this complexity, Gartner recommends that CDOs look to adopt a converged data management platform (DMP) that replaces much of their current patchwork of solutions with an end-to-end data fabric. However, as this blog outlines, the analyst stresses that DMPs alone won’t provide all the capabilities that CDOs require, meaning they must look to deploy best-of-breed solutions, such as data product marketplaces, that integrate seamlessly with their DMP in other areas.

Organizations increasingly rely on data, particularly when it comes to successfully deploying AI solutions. Turning data into tangible business value is therefore crucial for CDOs and their teams.

However, over time many organizations have bought a wide variety of standalone data management solutions, meaning they are now held back by dense, interconnected and overlapping toolchains. According to Gartner the average organization has deployed over a dozen different data management tools and potentially has hundreds of data pipelines and stores. This means that the CDO role has moved from delivering data to managing this complex modern data stack, taking up more and more time and budget.

Clearly, the business wants access to data, and doesn’t care about the infrastructure that is used to provide it. CDOs have to turn this patchwork of solutions into a seamless infrastructure that combines data mesh and data fabric approaches to reduce the time to deliver AI-ready data.

This requires a shift in mindset and technology. As Gartner says, “Success is not measured on data deliverables but on data products that are easy to find, use and maintain.”

These data products must be highly-consumable, continually managed and improved and provide everything needed to be used at scale by non-experts for a specific, high-value business need. To ensure transparency they must be governed by clear data contracts that set out SLAs, encouraging usage and reinforcing governance.

Data products deliver faster insights, better decision-making, greater data consumption across the business, increased agility and potential new revenue streams through data monetization. The benefits of data products are already becoming clear. Top performing organizations are more likely to be deploying mature data products than laggards, for example.

Over half (56%) of senior data leaders interviewed for the 2025 Gartner Chief Data and Analytics Officer Agenda Survey considered optimizing the technology landscape as their primary responsibility.

To support this goal, an increasing number of vendors are now offering data management platforms (DMPs), converged, end-to-end solutions that provide core capabilities in a single product and replace point-solutions. DMPs are the start point on the journey to data ecosystems that deliver all data management and consumption requirements through a seamless data fabric.

While an emerging category, data management platforms share specific capabilities:

• They integrate different data management features into a single platform, from a single vendor
• They enable both business and technical users to better manage data, increasing simplicity and reducing costs
• They rely on shared metadata and agentic AI to automate data management.

As they replace multiple legacy systems they can reduce costs by up to 50%, while also providing easier management and monitoring, greater agility, improved governance, and the faster supply of AI-ready data.
Moving forward, data management platforms are helping to drive benefits in four key areas:

The persistence layer

Organizations currently have multiple database management systems (DBMS) in place, often covering specific types of data. Rationalizing these through a single DMP that consolidates and ensures multimodal data persistence brings agility and cost benefits at a foundational level.

The metadata layer

Consistency of metadata across the tech stack is essential to data cataloging, governance and discovery. Supporting all operational data use cases with a DMP therefore not only brings cost reduction benefits, but also lowers risk and helps increase data usage.

The fabric layer

By converging data management capabilities (such as integration) in the data fabric layer, organizations benefit from a more agile, better managed infrastructure. However, Gartner stresses that currently DMPs cannot provide all the capabilities required for the organization, making it vital to incorporate best-of-breed solutions from other vendors where there are gaps.

The ecosystem layer

While DMPs can handle foundational data management layers, achieving the end goal of creating a data ecosystem is a multivendor approach. This diversity enables new capabilities to be easily added, especially in adjacent areas such as data sharing (including through data product marketplaces), analytics/BI, and AI. Deploying these solutions enables organizations to drive increased data consumption, as well as improved data management.

It is vital to understand that DMPs are not the complete answer for data management and consumption. The category is still immature, meaning that many currently lack key capabilities that organizations may rely on. Equally, depending on how they integrate and share data there is a risk of vendor lock-in once a specific DMP is deployed.

More importantly, DMPs provide a foundation and there will always be a need to extend their data management capabilities with more innovative best-of-breed solutions.That means CDOs must pick DMPs that offer extensibility, APIs, open integration frameworks such as MCP, and partnerships with best-of-breed vendors to build their data ecosystems.

This is particularly true when it comes to enabling the creation, discovery and consumption of data products. In the 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Management, the analyst singles out data products for their transformative potential, which it sees as reaching maturity within 2-5 years.

Ensuring data products are easily accessible and consumable by humans and AI requires a centralized, self-service platform. These data marketplaces & exchanges (DMEs) provide a single internal, external or ecosystem space to share data products and other data assets, through an intuitive interface, strong access controls and AI search. This extends data consumption beyond technical experts to the entire business, including those without data skills.

DMPs do not provide these data sharing and consumption capabilities, meaning that organizations have to combine foundational data management with the innovation and value that data marketplaces provide.

Gartner includes Huwise (under its previous name of Opendatasoft) as a Sample Vendor in the data marketplace & exchange category in its latest data management Hype Cycle. Huwise’s platform provides a collaboration space for the business around data, scaling human and AI data consumption through:

• A seamless, e-commerce style experience that is simple and intuitive to use
• Powerful discovery and search features driven by AI
• Complete access to all data in a variety of formats, ensuring a single version of the truth
• Comprehensive integration and export capabilities through APIs and use of the the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable agentic AI
• Robust governance and granular access management to ensure security and compliance
• Strong, deep partnerships with providers of DMPs, such as Precisely

The pressure is on for CDOs to better manage their increasing data volumes, while increasing its availability, consumption and value. DMPs deliver foundational capabilities to simplify management and bring down costs, but as Gartner stresses CDO’s data strategies will only deliver value if they are complemented by best-of-breed, innovative solutions such as data marketplaces in an ecosystem approach.