Executive Summary

Key Takeaways

Streaming data platforms have become foundational technologies for enterprises seeking to process, enrich and act on event data as it is generated. Organizations increasingly rely on streaming data capabilities to support real-time decision-making, event-driven architectures and AI-enabled automation across distributed environments. The convergence of streaming, analytics and AI is accelerating the shift from batch-centric processing toward continuous, responsive data operations.

Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Streaming Data evaluates 25 software providers offering products that support event streaming, stream processing and governance of data in motion. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Databricks, AWS and Microsoft. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. AWS, Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, IBM, Microsoft and MongoDB were rated Exemplary, with Alibaba Cloud, Cloud Software Group, Palantir and Redis rated Innovative. Actian, Oracle, Salesforce and Solace were rated Assurance, and Aiven, Broadcom, Cumulocity, KX, Red Hat, SAS, Siemens and Tencent Cloud were rated Merit.

Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (50%) and Platform (30%), including adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Databricks, Confluent and AWS achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by event streaming infrastructure and stream processing capabilities combined with stream governance and AI support for real-time data operations. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied streaming, integration and operational data management contexts.

Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. AWS, IBM and Oracle were the Leaders in this category, demonstrating strong customer commitment and clear dedication to customer needs. Providers with lower performance often lacked sufficient information to demonstrate customer success, articulate commitment to customer experience or communicate measurable value through TCO/ROI.

Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should evaluate streaming data platforms based on their ability to support scalable event processing, governance and integration across today’s data architectures. Assessment should prioritize stream processing performance, governance maturity, observability, AI integration and support for both stateless and stateful workloads. Organizations should also evaluate how effectively providers unify data in motion and data at rest while enabling real-time automation, analytics and intelligent applications.

 

The Findings

The software providers and products evaluated in this research offer product and customer experiences, but not every feature is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to support the relevant business processes and use cases. Moreover, having too many product capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities is important and meets your enterprise’s requirements.

An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more ISG_BG_Streaming_Data_Overall_2026deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes in line with TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is evident throughout the provider’s website, the buying process and the customer journey.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Databricks atop the list, followed by AWS and Microsoft. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. AWS and Databricks have done so in four categories, Confluent and Oracle in two and IBM, Microsoft and Palantir in one category.

About the authors

Matt Aslett

Matt Aslett

Matt leads the expertise in Digital Technology covering applications and technology that improve the readiness and resilience of business and IT operations. His focus areas of expertise and market coverage include: analytics and data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, blockchain, cloud computing, collaborative and conversational computing, extended reality, Internet of Things mobile computing and robotic automation. Matt’s specialization is in operational and analytical use of data and how businesses can modernize their approaches to business to accelerate the value realization of technology investments in support of hybrid and multi-cloud architecture. Matt has been an industry analyst for more than a decade and has pioneered the coverage of emerging data platforms including NoSQL and NewSQL databases, data lakes and cloud-based data processing. He is a graduate of Bournemouth University.
David Menninger

David Menninger

David is responsible for the overall research direction of data, information and analytics technologies at Ventana Research covering major areas including Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence and Information Management along with the additional specific research categories including Information Applications, IT Performance Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence and IoT, and Data Science. David is also responsible for examining the role of cloud computing, collaboration and mobile technologies as they affect these areas. David brings to Ventana Research over twenty-five years of experience, through which he has marketed and brought to market some of the leading edge technologies for helping organizations analyze data to support a range of action-taking and decision-making processes. Prior to joining Ventana Research, David was the Head of Business Development & Strategy at Pivotal a division of EMC, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Vertica Systems, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Oracle, Applix, InforSense and IRI Software. David earned his MS in Business from Bentley University and a BS in Economics from University of Pennsylvania.