Denodo boosts ROI, saves USD $3.6M in data lakehouse use

A new independent study by Veqtor8 has found that enterprises utilising the Denodo Platform in conjunction with modern data lakehouses, such as Snowflake or Databricks, can achieve a 345% return on investment, USD $3.6 million in cost avoidance, and 3 to 4 times faster time-to-insight compared to those using lakehouses alone.

The study, which incorporated structured research and in-depth interviews with large organisations, examined both technical and operational impacts of deploying Denodo alongside a data lakehouse. Veqtor8's research indicated that companies relying solely on data lakehouses faced higher engineering complexity, project delays, and increased costs, particularly when deploying artificial intelligence and analytics initiatives.

Key findings

Veqtor8 found that organisations integrating the Denodo Platform with a modern data lakehouse achieved return on investment of 345% over a three-year period. This calculation was based on structured stakeholder interviews as well as industry benchmarks.

Cost avoidance was also significant. Enterprises saw USD $3.6 million in avoided costs, primarily by reducing expenditure on engineering complexity and infrastructure development that would otherwise be required to manage data with a lakehouse alone.

Another key performance metric highlighted in the study was the short payback period: companies reported recouping their investment within 6.5 months. According to Veqtor8, organisations also benefited from 3 to 4 times faster time-to-insight, largely due to the platform's use of virtualised data access and a semantic abstraction layer.

Organisations without Denodo often faced the necessity of building custom pipelines, point-to-point integrations, and employing redundant data governance tools. These measures led to higher engineering costs, extended delivery times, and wasted investment. Delays in data readiness and access were especially acute in projects involving AI and real-time decision processes.

Business-ready data needs

Lakehouses provide essential storage and compute for unified analytics, but they weren't designed to deliver business-ready data on their own. Our analysis shows that without a logical data management platform like Denodo, enterprises consistently experience project delays, higher costs, and missed opportunities - particularly in AI and real-time decision-making. Denodo can close this gap and enable organisations to unlock the full value of their data lakehouse investments.

The study underscores that the Denodo Platform enables unified governance, simplifies data engineering, and supports delivery of both AI-ready and business-ready data across organisational silos. This is achieved without incurring the costs and delays often experienced with traditional data management approaches that involve significant data replication and additional infrastructure.

Customers who participated in the study consistently reported that initiatives requiring months without Denodo could often be executed in days when the platform was used. Participants attributed this acceleration to the logical data management capabilities provided by Denodo, which streamline the process of making data available for business use and analytics.

Industry perspectives

Clearly, organisations lose money when they rely solely on data lakehouses, rather than supporting their lakehouses with logical data management. Beyond the money, it's also the effort involved when relying on a lakehouse alone, which can delay the delivery of data to business users, ultimately risking an organisation becoming less competitive. The results of the Veqtor8 study are clear - using Denodo alongside a data lakehouse provides tangible financial benefits that have been realised by Denodo customers, and non-Denodo customers can attest to the cost and effort of relying solely on a data lakehouse for equivalent capabilities.

Additional perspective from a head of technology at a global banking institution, who contributed to the study, illustrated the operational advantages, noting, "We can now feed our fraud models with real-time transaction data across systems using Denodo. This shortens deployment by months."

The results of the research have been formalised in a whitepaper, outlining how Denodo's logical data management can help organisations derive greater value and efficiency from their data lakehouse investments. The findings suggest that supplementing a data lakehouse with a logical data management layer supports faster, more cost-effective, and scalable data delivery for a range of business priorities.