The Naked Truth about Data Lakehouses: Delayed Projects and Wasted $Millions
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For years, enterprises have invested heavily in cloud-native lakehouses like Snowflake and Databricks to unify analytics at scale. These platforms are powerful—the culmination of decades of innovation in analytic technology stacks, starting with enterprise data warehouses, continuing through the “big data” wave, and up to the cloud-native unified engines of today.

By now, many enterprises are actively migrating to lakehouses, or are already in production with them, and believe that they are set up for success in an AI-driven future. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: many organizations are still struggling. According to MIT, 95% of AI projects don’t demonstrate ROI. And countless business users still complain that they cannot easily find, access, or utilize the data they need, when they need it. 

A new independent ROI study by Veqtor8, an analyst firm specializing in AI and data management, got to the bottom of why this is happening, and proves this is real. If you’re relying on a lakehouse alone, you may be leaving money on the table. In fact, you could be delaying projects by months and wasting millions of dollars.

The Eye-Opening Numbers

The Veqtor8 study compared organizations using lakehouses alone against those that paired them with the Denodo Platform, and the difference was striking:

  • 3–4× faster time-to-insight. Data requests from the business are fulfilled in much less time, accelerating their business benefits.
  • 78% reduction in data engineering effort to deliver those data sets.
  • 75% reduction in ongoing data-related operational costs, including both IT infrastructure and data engineering overhead.
  • 5-10x greater business agility. AI and other new business initiatives benefited from  data going live much more quickly, and subsequent iterations happened just as quickly.
  • 345% increased ROI over three years, on average across all organizations interviewed.
  • Payback on Denodo investment within 6 ½ months.

The conclusion: Lakehouses do a good job storing and executing analytic workloads on your consolidated data, but Denodo makes it usable to AI and your business—governed, explainable, and delivered live, regardless of where it resides. Let’s unpack how Denodo makes this possible.

Why Lakehouses Struggle with Modern Demands

During the research, interviewees all shared consistent feedback. Lakehouses are great for analytics, but today’s most strategic initiatives—AI, self-service, operational intelligence—are not purely analytic. They are operational. Which means they require:

  1. Live data access, enabling real-time decisions based on current reality, not the snapshot from the last time your ingestion pipelines happened to run.
  2. Business-contextual semantics, so that the right data is used by both AI and human users for the task at hand, without requiring data team intervention.
  3. Consistent governance, applied across every data silo including SaaS and 3rd parties.
  4. Smarter optimization of cost and performance, so innovation doesn’t break the budget.

Without Denodo, Lakehouse users must often stitch together pipelines, a semantic layer, FinOps and data governance controls either through custom coding or from multiple point tools. The result? Higher costs, longer delays, less agility, and increased compliance risk.

Better Together

Lakehouses provide a scalable data foundation. Denodo delivers the last mile: logical data management that makes data AI-ready, business-ready, and operations-ready.

As one global bank’s head of enterprise data architecture put it:

“With Denodo, we can deliver governed, business-ready data across all our platforms without duplicating it. AI and analytics initiatives go live much faster, and we don’t compromise on governance or data quality.”

The head of technology procurement at a global mining company put it even more directly:

“With Denodo, our time-to-insight went from months to days for key high-value use cases.”

In short: lakehouses are important, but not sufficient for ensuring success in an AI-driven future and emerging operational use cases, which require governed data in real time. Don’t present a naked lakehouse to your AI and business users! Together with Denodo, you can unlock the full promise of trusted, real-time, enterprise-wide intelligence.

For a deeper dive into the Veqtor8 results, read the white paper based on the study, entitled The ROI of Using the Denodo Platform alongside the Modern Data Lakehouse.

Dominic Sartorio
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