What Forrester’s 2026 Data Lakehouse Landscape Signals About the Market — And Where Dremio Fits

The data lakehouse market has moved past the “is this real?” phase. According to Forrester’s The Data Lakehouses Landscape, Q1 2026, lakehouses are now the default architectural choice for modern analytics and AI workloads, driven by the need to simplify data architectures, control costs, and support modern analytics and AI workloads.

For technology leaders navigating an increasingly crowded data platform ecosystem, this shift matters. Lakehouses are no longer experimental alternatives to data warehouses or data lakes — they are becoming the default foundation for analytics and AI.

As Forrester puts it:

“The data lakehouse is an established technology market.”

That framing sets the tone for the report. Rather than focusing on whether lakehouses will succeed, Forrester examines how enterprises should evaluate vendors in a market defined by scale, openness, governance, and real-time capability.

Why Enterprises Are Standardizing On Lakehouses

Forrester defines a data lakehouse as:

“A unified data architecture that combines the scalability and flexibility of data lakes with the reliability, governance, and performance features of data warehouses to support analytics, data science, AI, and real-time workloads on a single platform.”

This definition reflects a broader shift we see across enterprises: reducing architectural sprawl while increasing flexibility. Instead of moving data between disconnected systems, organizations want a single, governed foundation that can serve business intelligence, ad hoc analytics, data science, and emerging AI use cases.

Forrester highlights three core drivers behind adoption:

• Lowering data and AI infrastructure costs
  
• Delivering real-time insights through streamlined architectures
  
• Supporting advanced AI initiatives on a unified platform
  

In particular, the report notes that eliminating unnecessary data movement is critical for AI readiness, enabling teams to train and deploy models directly on raw, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

A Market Shaped By Openness And Intelligence

One of the most consistent themes in the landscape is openness. Forrester emphasizes that enterprises are increasingly prioritizing open data formats to avoid vendor lock-in and preserve long-term architectural flexibility.

At the same time, the market is evolving beyond traditional analytics. As the report notes:

“Vendors are rapidly expanding with agentic AI and data intelligence capabilities.”

This evolution reflects rising expectations that data platforms do more than store and query data — they should actively help users discover, understand, and operationalize it, while embedding governance and security by design.

Where Dremio Fits In The Landscape

Dremio is included in Forrester’s 2026 data lakehouse landscape alongside hyperscalers and major data platform vendors, reinforcing its position as part of the established lakehouse ecosystem.

Dremio’s agentic lakehouse accelerates AI initiatives by turning data into action at enterprise scale. By embedding semantic understanding, governance, and automation directly into the data layer, Dremio enables both people and AI systems to work from a consistent, trusted view of data. Its AI-powered semantic layer and open, flexible catalog reduce manual data preparation, eliminate unnecessary data copies, and allow analytics and AI workloads to operate directly on open data lakes—driving faster decision cycles, lower costs, and more scalable AI adoption.

For organizations focused on open architectures, flexibility across deployment models, and enabling analytics directly on cloud data lakes, these priorities closely mirror the broader market direction Forrester outlines.

What This Means For Data Leaders

Forrester’s landscape makes one thing clear: the lakehouse market has matured, but differentiation increasingly comes down to how well platforms balance performance, governance, openness, and usability — especially as AI workloads become mainstream.

For data and analytics leaders, the takeaway isn’t just which vendors appear on the chart. It’s understanding which platforms align with their long-term architectural principles, data strategy, and operating model.

Forrester clients can access the full report directly via their Forrester account.

Forrester Objectivity Statement

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.