A blueprint for the modern, AI-ready lakehouse

Forrester Research's report examines the evolution and current landscape of data lakehouses, highlighting their role as established platforms for analytics and AI, which help organizations reduce costs, enhance interoperability, and support large-scale, AI-driven workloads. The report contrasts the limitations of traditional data warehouses and data lakes with the advantages of lakehouses, which combine the scalability of lakes with the governance of warehouses. It underscores the importance of reliable, automated data ingestion, interoperability, and continuous maintenance for successful lakehouse implementation. Fivetran is identified as a leading vendor due to its automated data extraction, loading, and transformation capabilities, support for open table formats to prevent vendor lock-in, and robust pipeline reliability to support real-time and AI workloads without operational complexity. The report concludes that operational success in the lakehouse market hinges on simplifying ingestion, adopting open architectures, and minimizing maintenance, positioning organizations for faster insights and AI innovation.