What happens when you pack a room with data engineers, analysts, CTOs, and data leaders? You get hard truths, big ideas, and a clear signal: modern data platforms are no longer optional.
At the Yellowbrick booth, data platforms such as SQL Server, Oracle Exadata, and Teradata dominated the conversation. The criticisms were familiar: low performance, highcost, and no room to scale.
Nowadays, organizations aren’t just exploring cloud—they are demanding platforms that deliver:
- Fast, flexible deployment (on-prem, cloud and hybrid)
- Seamless AI/ML integration
- Zero trade-offs in performance or control
It was no surprise to hear from many government and financial institutions about the need to stay on-prem for privacy and data control. The takeaway? It’s not just about moving to the cloud; it’s about aligning data control, compliance, and readiness for growth.
As a proud sponsor, Yellowbrick had conversations with multiple leaders — and one message was clear: 2025 is the year of modernizing data infrastructure.
Here’s what we heard, learned and presented.
Yellowbrick Session: Cloud-Native on Your Terms
In a standout session, Yellowbrick’s CTO, Mark Cusack, challenged conventional thinking on cloud data warehousing. His core message? Hybrid is not a compromise; it’s a strategic advantage.
Mark outlined how enterprises are rethinking the “cloud-only” mantra, especially as always-on cloud workloads drive up costs and data sovereignty laws tighten. Many organizations are repatriating workloads to regain control over costs, performance, and governance.
The key takeaways include:
- Portability without complexity: Kubernetes enables Yellowbrick to run seamlessly across clouds or on-prem without re-architecting.
- Elasticity anywhere: On-prem users get compute/storage separation and autoscaling benefits just like cloud-native users.
- Control without compromise: Yellowbrick runs in your cloud account — not SaaS — so you own your data, control plane, and deployment path.
GenAI Needs Good Data – Fast, Structured, Governed.
AI and LLMs were everywhere at Data Summit 2025. The smartest voices weren’t talking about the models. They were talking about the data infrastructure behind them.
From copilots to auto-generated dashboards, most GenAI use cases fail without fast, structured, governed data. As one attendee shared: “An LLM is only as smart as the data it can reach”.
Despite all the buzz, most data platforms still aren’t ready. Common pitfalls:
- LLM hallucinations from stale or siloed data
- Lack of integration across diverse sources
- Limited support for deploying/tuning in-house LLMs
To move from GenAI experiments to production at scale, platforms must:
- Serve fresh, governed data at low latency
- Support vector search + real-time responses
- Scale with AI pipelines without compromising data quality
Bottom line: GenAI doesn’t replace the data stack; it raises the bar.
Data Adoption in 2025
John O’Brien from Radiant Advisors shared his latest research on 2025 data adoption:
- 85% of organizations have approved data budgets
- 50% of them plan to spend $50K-$500K
- 14% budget over $1 million dollars.
Top 3 investment priorities for 2025:
Priorities | Top Challenges | Top Outcomes |
|---|---|---|
1) GenAI + LLMs | Accuracy, privacy, skills gap | Smarter decisions, productivity |
2) Real-Time Analytics | Real-time + historical integration | Faster, cheaper ops |
3) Cloud Data Warehouse Modernization | Roadmap clarity, distributed data | Self-service analytics, speed |
Final Take: The future belongs to the ones that are data-ready
Every conversation at Data Summit 2025 pointed to one truth: data can be the bottleneck or the breakthrough.
AI, real-time insights, and intelligent apps are as powerful as the platforms behind them. Success won’t come from having the biggest tools — but from having the most efficient and flexible foundations.
Yellowbrick is ready. Are you?
Let’s talk about modernizing, optimizing, or augmenting your existing data platform.
