Study conducted by Veqtor8 finds delayed projects and $millions at risk when enterprises operate lakehouses without a logical data layer
PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 24, 2025, a leader in data management, announced the availability of a new study conducted by independent analyst firm Veqtor8. The study compared the ROI of using the Denodo Platformalongside data lakehouses, such as those provided by Snowflake and Databricks, versus relying on lakehouses alone. The study found that organizations risked leaving millions of dollars on the table - and months-long delays in AI and analytics initiatives - by not augmenting their lakehouse investments with a logical data managementplatform.
To arrive at these findings, Veqtor8 conducted both structured research and in-depth interviews with large companies that use leading data lakehouse platforms both with and without Denodo, quantifying the technical, operational, and financial impact of leveraging Denodo in this configuration. The study found that organizations that use Denodo alongside a modern data lakehouse achieved:
- 345% ROI over three years. This was derived from structured inputs from stakeholder interviews and industry benchmarks.
- $3.6 million in cost avoidance. For organizations that run data lakehouses alone, this cost was primarily spent on engineering complexity and infrastructural development.
- Payback in just 6.5 months. This was a key performance indicator that was measured directly from participating organizations.
- 3-4x faster time-to-insight, gained from virtualized data access and a semantic abstraction layer.
In contrast, enterprises attempting to achieve the same outcomes without Denodo were forced into costly custom pipelines, point-to-point integrations, and redundant data governance tools - driving higher engineering effort, longer timelines, and wasted investment.
"Lakehouses provide essential storage and compute for unified analytics, but they weren't designed to deliver business-ready data on their own," said Andrew Milroy, chief analyst at Veqtor8 and lead author of this study. "Our analysis shows that without a logical data management platform like Denodo, enterprises consistently experience project delays, higher costs, and missed opportunities - particularly in AI and real-time decision-making. Denodo can close this gap and enable organizations to unlock the full value of their data lakehouse investments."
The report highlights that Denodo enables enterprises to unify governance, simplify data engineering, and deliver AI-ready, business-ready data across silos - without the costly replication and infrastructure delays associated with traditional approaches. Customers consistently reported that initiatives that took months without Denodo could be delivered in days with Denodo.
"Clearly, organizations lose money when they rely solely on data lakehouses, rather than supporting their lakehouses with logical data management. Beyond the money, it's also the effort involved when relying on a lakehouse alone, which can delay the delivery of data to business users, ultimately risking an organization becoming less competitive," said Ravi Shankar, senior vice president (SVP) and chief marketing officer (CMO) at Denodo. "The results of the Veqtor8 study are clear - using Denodo alongside a data lakehouse provides tangible financial benefits that have been realized by Denodo customers, and non-Denodo customers can attest to the cost and effort of relying solely on a data lakehouse for equivalent capabilities."
A head of technology for a global bank, who participated in this study, said, "We can now feed our fraud models with real-time transaction data across systems using Denodo. This shortens deployment by months."
Veqtor8 published the results of this study in a whitepaper entitled The ROI of Using the Denodo Platform alongside the Modern Data Lakehouse, and a complimentary copy is available on the Denodo website.
About Denodo
Denodo is a leader in data management. The award-winning Denodo Platform is the leading logical data management platform for transforming data into trustworthy insights and outcomes for all data-related initiatives across the enterprise, including AI and self-service. Denodo's customers in all industries all over the world have delivered trusted AI-ready and business-ready data in a third of the time and with 10x better performance than with lakehouses and other mainstream data platforms alone. For more information, visit denodo.com.
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