The IT Nerd

Here’s some 2026 Industry Predictions by Justin Borgman, CEO and Cofounder, Starburst.

The Rise of Human-and-Machine-Centered Data Ecosystems – “We’re moving toward a world where data platforms won’t primarily serve people anymore; they’ll serve machines. The new consumers of data are AI agents, which will increasingly drive decisions, generate insights, and automate processes at speeds humans can’t match. These AI agents will require direct, governed, real-time access to all enterprise data to reason, generate, and act effectively. As AI agents become the primary consumers, enterprises must decide whether their data governance models empower or constrain them. This shift fundamentally changes everything about how we build and operate data infrastructure, from architecture and pipelines to governance and security, demanding a new approach that prioritizes machine-first accessibility without sacrificing trust or compliance.”

Hybrid AI Becomes the New Default – “The ‘cloud-everything’ era is coming to an end. Data gravity, sovereignty laws, and inference cost control are drivers for on-premises and model-to-data architectures. Enterprises are realizing that critical AI workloads need to remain close to their data, whether on-premises or in hybrid environments, to meet stringent requirements for performance, compliance, and data sovereignty. As a result, DevOps and data teams will increasingly build intelligent, governed ‘AI factories’ inside the enterprise, integrating AI pipelines directly with existing systems rather than relying solely on public cloud services. This approach ensures organizations can scale AI responsibly while maintaining control over sensitive information and operational efficiency.”

The Real Battle Moves Above the Data Format – “The last decade was about standardizing how we store data; the next is about standardizing how we trust it. With open table formats like Iceberg now widely adopted as the standard, the next competitive frontier isn’t the format itself. It’s the management of metadata, governance, and secure access. AI explainability depends on how well metadata is managed. Enterprise success will hinge on how effectively DevOps and data teams curate data catalogs, enforce policies, and provide federated access across diverse environments. Without unified metadata and policy, enterprises risk an AI compliance crisis. It’s no longer just about where the data lives; it’s about how intelligently it can be accessed, trusted, and leveraged to drive actionable outcomes.”

DevOps for Machines, Not Just Humans – “DevOps is evolving beyond its traditional focus on deploying applications. DevOps for machines means governing the real-time interaction between AI agents and enterprise data, with the same rigor once reserved for production apps. Modern teams will now treat data and AI pipelines as mission-critical workloads, ensuring that AI agents have real-time, governed access to enterprise data while maintaining reliability, security, and observability at scale. DevOps for machines is about managing the data-to-action lifecycle, not model training pipelines. Humans remain responsible for defining access, policy, and safety nets. For example, tomorrow’s DevOps teams will monitor not only application uptime, but also AI decision health to ensure agents operate within defined parameters. This evolution requires a new mindset: one where DevOps teams are responsible for orchestrating an ecosystem in which machines, not just humans, can operate safely, efficiently, and autonomously.”

Starburst today announced it is joining the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), an open source initiative that creates a universal specification for all companies to standardize their fragmented data definitions with an open, vendor-neutral semantic model specification. OSI aims to enhance interoperability across various tools and platforms, offering enterprises a vendor-neutral specification that provides consistent metrics and definitions across dashboards, notebooks, and machine learning models. 

OSI is an open source initiative led by Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, and ecosystem partners across multiple domains and industries including business intelligence (BI), data governance, data engineering, AI, financial services, and manufacturing. Its goal is to create a common, vendor-agnostic specification that defines semantic metadata in a standard, open format. By facilitating seamless semantic metadata exchange, the initiative will accelerate the adoption of AI and BI tools to streamline operations and reduce complexity. This in turn allows organizations to unify their data definitions, leading to more comprehensive and accurate data analysis and data product sharing to fuel AI innovation.

As a member of OSI, Starburst is helping to build a transparent and community-driven standard for semantic model sharing, ensuring that business metrics and definitions remain consistent and interoperable.

OSI is poised to revolutionize interoperability within the data and AI ecosystem by providing a transparent, community-driven standard. This collaborative effort simplifies data operations, unlocks new possibilities for innovation, and gives organizations the flexibility and efficiency they need to build a future-ready data infrastructure.

To learn more about the Open Semantic Interchange visit Snowflake’s blog here. 

Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, recognized the winners of the 2025 Data Visionary Awards at a celebration event held alongside AI & Datanova 2025 Thursday evening. The awards honor customers and partners who are harnessing data and AI to deliver transformative results, accelerate innovation, and shape the future of their industries.

The awards celebrate achievements across six customer categories and four partner categories, recognizing visionaries whose leadership and execution are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Starburst.

Customer Award Winners

●      AI & Data Visionary Award: S&P Global Market Intelligence – Enterprise Solutions Technology Team

The Enterprise Solutions Technology team at S&P Global Market Intelligence is recognized for its bold vision and execution in building a modern, AI-ready data foundation leveraging Starburst. By embracing a federated, governed architecture, the team has accelerated innovation, reduced time-to-market, and set a new standard for responsible AI adoption.

●        Executive AI & Data Visionary Award Winner: Anna Nicanorova, CTO, Annalect

Anna is recognized for her leadership in driving Annalect’s enterprise-wide data vision and AI transformation. By championing Starburst, she has accelerated insights, strengthened decision-making, and delivered measurable business impact across Annalect’s global operations.

●        Data AI Award Winner: Asurion
Asurion is recognized for building a modern, AI-ready data foundation with Starburst, including Iceberg lakehouses, federated access, and strong governance. This approach positions Asurion for scalable AI adoption, future RAG use cases, and accelerated enterprise insights.

●        Impact Through AI Award Winner: Arity

Arity is recognized for harnessing Starburst to power data-driven insights that improve transportation safety and efficiency. By applying AI to vast mobility datasets, Arity helps businesses and communities reduce risk, optimize operations, and make faster, more informed decisions, thereby delivering measurable impact across the transportation ecosystem.

●        Data Pathfinder Award Winner: Periyasamy Sivakumar (Siva), Head of Data Engineering, OCBC
Siva is recognized for his leadership in driving Starburst adoption and data modernization at OCBC. Through hands-on influence and advocacy, he has delivered results in a complex, regulated environment and inspired peers across the organization.

●        Data Disruptor Award Winner: PSEG Long Island

PSEG Long Island is recognized for its bold, fast-moving approach to transforming data and analytics. By leveraging Starburst to modernize access to critical data and accelerate insights, PSEG Long Island demonstrated how a forward-thinking organization can disrupt traditional practices and drive meaningful impact.

Partner Award Winners

●        Starburst Partner: Data Visionary Award Winner:  Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS)
AWS is recognized for advancing cloud-native AI and data solutions that empower enterprises to unlock transformative insights and accelerate business value with Starburst.

●        Starburst Partner: Data Trailblazer Award Winner: Dell Technologies
Dell is celebrated for helping joint customers modernize their data architectures with Starburst, delivering integrated, high-performance solutions that bring the power of governed, federated analytics to enterprises at scale, and enabling organizations to accelerate their AI and data-driven initiatives.

●        Integration & Ecosystem Impact Award Winner: Alteryx
Alteryx is honored for delivering seamless integration and technical innovation that extend the value of Starburst, enabling organizations to achieve new levels of interoperability and business impact.

●        Managed Service Excellence Award Winner: Kubrick
Kubrick is recognized for outstanding implementation expertise, customer satisfaction, and the ability to drive transformative outcomes through high-impact Starburst deployments.

Attend AI + Datanova Virtual featuring Trino Day, a two-day virtual event, October 22–23, 2025. Register here

 Starburst today announced at AI & Datanova, a new set of capabilities designed to operationalize the Agentic Workforce—a paradigm where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly across workflows to reason, decide, and act faster and with confidence. With new, built-in support for model-to-data architectures, multi-agent interoperability, and an open vector store on Iceberg, Starburst delivers the first lakehouse platform that empowers AI agents, with unified enterprise data, governed data products, and metadata, empowering humans and AI to reason, act, and decide faster while ensuring trust and control.

Unlike legacy platforms that require data movement or rely on black-box retrieval, Starburst gives AI agents secure, governed access to data wherever it resides, on-premises or in the cloud, at enterprise scale. This federated, model-to-data approach helps organizations maintain sovereignty, reduce costs, and avoid compliance pitfalls, especially in highly regulated industries or cross-border environments.

To further strengthen enterprise confidence in AI, Starburst is introducing advanced observability and visualization features for its agent framework. Organizations can now monitor usage of LLM interactions, set guardrails with usage limits, and view activity through intuitive dashboards. In addition, Starburst’s agent can visualize responses into charts and graphs giving teams not only accurate answers but also clear, actionable insights. These capabilities provide a new level of transparency, governance, and usability as enterprises scale AI adoption.

Key Innovations Driving the Next Generation of AI and Analytics

Starburst’s new AI capabilities are built upon the core principle of flexibility, giving organizations the freedom to choose between model-to-data and data-to-model architectures. This approach enables enterprises to scale AI securely, while preserving sovereignty, reducing infrastructure costs, and ensuring compliance. These enhancements include:

●      Multi-Agent Ready Infrastructure: A new MCP server and agent API allows enterprises to create, manage, and orchestrate multiple AI agents along-side the Starburst agent. This enables customers to develop multi-agent and AI application solutions that are geared to complete tasks of growing complexity.

●      Open & Interoperable Vector Access: Starburst unifies access to vector stores, enabling retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and search tasks across Iceberg, PostgreSQL + PGVector, Elasticsearch and more. Enterprises gain flexibility to choose the right vector solution for each workload without lock-in or fragmentation.

●      Model Usage Monitoring & Control: Starburst offers enterprise-grade AI model monitoring and governance. Teams can track, audit, and control AI usage across agents and workloads with dashboards, preventing cost overruns and ensuring compliance for confident, scalable AI adoption.

●      Deeper Insights & Visualization: An extension of Starburst’s conversational analytics agent enables users to ask questions across different data product domains and provide back a natural language response in natural language, a visualization, or combination of the two. The agent is able to understand the user intent and question to do data discovery to find the right data before query processing to answer the question.

Beyond Dashboards and Copilots: The Next Era of AI

AI is rapidly moving past dashboards and copilots toward autonomous workflows that demand both real-time decisioning and long-term context. For enterprises in regulated sectors, including finance, telecom, manufacturing, and public services, this shift raises a critical challenge: how to harness AI’s potential without compromising on data sovereignty,governance,  or compliance.

Starburst’s Platform: Built for Global-Scale, Compliance-First AI

Building on its core capabilities, Starburst enables enterprises operating across the EU and other regulated regions to deploy AI without breaching data residency, privacy, or compliance mandates. The platform provides federated access to distributed data, allowing organizations to query and analyze information in place without unnecessary movement.

By design, Starburst ensures data sovereignty across borders, clouds, and business units, while metadata-driven policy enforcement supports GDPR, Schrems II, and other evolving global regulations. With governance embedded at every layer, enterprises gain the confidence to scale AI securely and compliantly, no matter where their data lives.

Availability

New innovations in the Starburst Data Platform will be generally available in Q4.

 Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced details for AI & Datanova 2025 virtual events, a global virtual event taking place October 22-23, 2025. The two-day experience will bring together engineers, data scientists, analysts, and technical decision-makers to explore innovations in Trino, data, and enterprise AI.

Day 1: Trino Day launches the event and delivers community-driven sessions with real-world stories featuring deep dives into architecture, performance tuning, and integration best practices from engineers running Trino at scale.

Day 2: AI + Datanova, Starburst’s marquee virtual showcase, highlights data and AI innovations, including an exclusive look at Starburst’s products powering next-generation applications. Attendees will leave with practical insights from smarter cloud data access and stronger governance, to proven strategies for accelerating AI adoption through robust data foundations. Registration grants free full access to both days with a single sign-up.

Registration for the virtual event is free and includes full access to both days. Details and sign-up are available at https://www.starburst.io/info/ai-datanova-2025/

In addition to the virtual experience, Starburst will host an exclusive in-person AI & Datanova Summit for data  and AI leaders on October 9, 2025, at The Westin N

Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced details for AI & Datanova 2025, taking place October 9, 2025, at The Westin New York Times Square. This in-person event will bring together senior data and technology leaders, including CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, chief architects, and Starburst power users to share strategies, innovations, and best practices for turning enterprise data into real-world AI outcomes.

The program will feature a range of keynotes, customer stories, and technical sessions. A highlight will be two keynote addresses by Starburst CEO and Co-founder Justin Borgman, who will draw on his deep experience helping enterprises unlock the value of their data to outline:

• The emerging era of Enterprise Agents — autonomous, AI-powered systems capable of carrying out complex business tasks across an organization.
• The data readiness challenge — why high-quality, governed, and accessible data will be the deciding factor in AI success over the next three to five years.
• The blueprint for enabling AI at enterprise scale — including the role of federated query, governance, and real-time access in powering next-generation applications.
• Predictions for the AI-driven enterprise — from the transformation of decision-making to entirely new categories of customer experiences.

Borgman’s keynote will expand on these themes, offering concrete strategies and real-world customer examples of how leading organizations are building their data foundations to take full advantage of the AI revolution. Additional featured speakers include executives and senior leaders from Arity, Expedia, OCBC Bank, and more.

Registration details are available at https://www.starburst.io/ai-and-datanova/#register

Submissions Now Open for the 2025 Data Visionary Awards

In conjunction with the event, Starburst also announced that submissions are now open for the 2025 Data Visionary Awards. These awards honor customers and partners who are using data and AI to deliver transformative results and redefine what’s possible in their industries.

Award categories include:

• AI & Data Visionary Award
• Executive AI & Data Visionary Award
• Data AI Award
• Impact Through AI Award
• Data Pathfinder Award
• Data Disruptor Award

In addition, partner-specific awards will recognize outstanding contributions by region, as well as the Implementation Partner of the Year.

Key details:

• Submission deadline: September 5, 2025
• Winners announced: October 9, 2025, live at AI & Datanova 2025 in New York
• Eligibility: Customers, employees, and partners may submit nominations, including multiple categories if desired

Full award details and nomination forms are available at https://www.starburst.io/ai-and-datanova/data-visionary-awards/.

Starburst today announced it has been recognized as a Leader and Fast Mover in the newly released 2025 GigaOm Radar for Data Lakes and Lakehouses report. This marks the third consecutive year that Starburst has earned a leadership position in this influential industry benchmark.

The GigaOm report highlights Starburst’s dominance across key evaluation categories, including:

●        Product capabilities: Recognition for deep integration across modern cloud ecosystems and robust support for data federation and hybrid architectures.

●        Market execution: Acknowledgement of Starburst’s momentum and continued adoption as a distributed SQL engine built on open standards.

●        Innovation trajectory: Commended roadmap execution, leadership in the open lakehouse movement, and readiness for future AI-driven analytics workloads.

The GigaOm Radar evaluates vendors on a combination of feature richness, usability, performance, market strategy and innovation roadmap. Positioning Starburst in the Leader and Fast Mover affirms its ability to deliver high-performance federated querying and scalability, support for diverse open table and file formats, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, and a consolidated and governed data stack that supports analytics and AI workloads.

Download and explore the report here: https://starburst.io/info/gigaom-radar-for-data-lakes-and-lakehouses-2025/

 Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced a strategic investment from Citi. 

Starburst’s platform enables organizations to unify access to distributed data, across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments, without the need for data duplication or complex migrations.

• Starburst’s vision is to deliver cutting-edge AI and analytics solutions on an open, hybrid data lakehouse foundation. 
• The investment strengthens the company’s momentum in enabling global enterprises to build secure, scalable, and intelligent data applications. 
• By bringing AI “lakeside,” Starburst eliminates the traditional friction between data, governance, and AI. Starburst’s technology is used by 10 of the top 15 banks. 

Starburst continues to expand its reach into high-demand, regulated industries where AI is becoming a cornerstone of transformation.

 Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced a comprehensive set of product innovations across its flagship offerings: Starburst Enterprise Platform and Starburst Galaxy. The new Starburst AI Agent and new AI Workflows are designed to accelerate enterprise AI initiatives and support the transition to a future-ready data architecture built on a data lakehouse. By bringing distributed, hybrid data lakeside to power AI, apps and analytics, Starburst enables faster, more secure, and collaborative data access. With native AI tooling, the Starburst Data Catalog, and advancements to data ingestion, table maintenance and governance, enterprises can unlock the full power of the modern data lakehouse.

AI is pushing the limits of existing enterprise data architecture and most organizations are held back by fragmented data spread across clouds, formats, and teams. Building AI workflows often means stitching together brittle pipelines, coordinating across siloed tools, and managing sensitive data without consistent governance. Legacy architectures make it difficult to access the right data, involve the right stakeholders, and enforce the right policies: slowing experimentation, increasing risk, and delaying results.

Introducing Starburst AI Agents: Unlock the Value of All Enterprise Data for Agent Intelligence

At the heart of Starburst’s latest innovations is Starburst AI Workflows, a purpose-built suite of capabilities that speeds AI experimentation to production for enterprises. AI Workflows connect the dots between vector-native search, metadata-driven context, and robust governance, all on an open data lakehouse architecture. Starburst is also launching Starburst AI Agent, an out-of-the-box natural language interface for Starburst’s data platform that can be built and deployed by data analysts and application-layer AI agents to bring faster insights to business stakeholders. With AI Workflows and the Starburst AI Agent, enterprises can build and scale AI applications faster, with reliable performance, lower cost, and greater confidence in security, compliance and control. 

New Starburst Data and AI Innovations include: 

• Starburst AI Agent – A built-in conversational interface for governed natural language data product documentation and insight generation, in your secure Starburst environment. Availability: In Private Preview
• Starburst AI Workflows – With the introduction of Starburst AI Workflows, Starburst is addressing a key challenge in AI: unlocking governed, proprietary data fast enough to drive real outcomes. With AI Workflows, teams can search unstructured data, orchestrate prompts and tasks with SQL, and govern model access, delivered through the unified Starburst platform. AI Workflows combine AI Search to transform unstructured data into vector embeddings in Iceberg using your choice of embedding model, AI SQL Functions to run prompts and built-in LLM tasks from SQL, and AI Model Access Management to control usage and enforce governance – all without pipelines or data movement. Availability: In Private Preview
• Simplify AI Governance and Collaboration – Galaxy’s AI-Powered Auto-Taggingsimplifies governance by using LLMs to detect sensitive data like PII at the column level. With human-in-the-loop review and support for custom user-defined classifiers, teams can confidently scale ABAC policies and enable secure, self-service access to business users, without requiring manual policy enforcement. Availability: In General Availability
• Interoperability Without Lock-In: Starburst Data Catalog – Starburst also unveiled Starburst Data Catalog, a modern, enterprise-grade metastore solution purpose-built to replace Hive Metastore in Starburst Enterprise. With native Iceberg support, seamless Hive migration, and a flexible foundation for future multi-engine integration, it helps organizations reduce metadata sprawl, improve query performance, and simplify governance – without vendor lock-in. Availability: In Private Preview
• Fully Managed Iceberg Pipelines – Starburst Galaxy delivers a fully managed, end-to-end Icehouse lakehouse experience on Iceberg, combining automated maintenance and multiple ingestion options to simplify data readiness at scale. Built-in Live Table Maintenance with built-in maintenance features including compaction, snapshot cleanup, and orphan file removal to keep Iceberg tables performant and cost-efficient with no manual tuning required. Customers can choose between Streaming Ingest for near real-time updates from Kafka or File Loader for batch-style loads from S3, all fully managed in Galaxy. File Loader Generally Available in July, Streaming Ingest and Live Table Maintenance Generally Available now
• Scale Iceberg Workloads – Starburst Galaxy now streamlines large-scale Iceberg operations with Automated Table Maintenance to manage compaction, cleanup, and retention across deployments, to reduce storage costs and improve query performance with minimal operational overhead. Native support for AWS S3 Table buckets unlocks high-performance querying on Amazon’s new auto-managed storage format, while Nanosecond Timestamp Type Support adds precision for time-sensitive analytics. Automated Table Maintenance is Generally Available; AWS S3 Tables and Iceberg Nanosecond Timestamp Type are in Public Preview.
• Faster, Reliable Query Performance with Starburst-Native ODBC – Starburst enhances analytics performance with a high-performance ODBC driver built for secure, scalable BI access across both Galaxy and Starburst Enterprise. By eliminating third-party dependencies, the Starburst-Native ODBC enables deeper integration with Trino’s spooling extension, OAuth authentication, and Tableau’s generic connector, and ships alongside Enhanced Power BI Support. Availability: Public Preview, GA in June
• Starburst Enterprise Gets Even Stronger – Iceberg Parity and Operational Simplicity – Starburst continues to deepen its commitment to advanced features on Starburst Enterprise with new Iceberg-powered capabilities, including Automated Table Maintenance, scheduled materialized view refreshes with Iceberg MV Automatic Refresh, and full support for Data Products on Iceberg – providing a streamlined path to a scalable, collaborative Iceberg lakehouse architecture suitable for AI workloads. Availability: Public Preview
• Drive Efficiency with Automatic Query Routing – Starburst Galaxy now routes queries to the right cluster based on load or user role, improving performance and simplifying access at scale. User Role-Based Routing directs queries to pre-configured clusters based on a user’s role, maximizing price-performance. Deployment Set Routing supports resilient, large-scale deployments by routing queries across a defined set of clusters – ideal for high concurrency and resilient workloads. User Role-Based Routing is Generally Available, Deployment Set Routing is Private Preview beginning May 30th.
• Starburst: Data-to-AI Readiness Blueprint –  A new services offering designed to help organizations align their data infrastructure with evolving AI strategies. This comprehensive engagement evaluates the readiness of existing data architecture, streamlines access and integration across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and ensures robust security and governance to support scalable AI workloads. Customers receive a tailored solution roadmap, architecture blueprint, and data product design guidance—empowering them to build a future-proof, high-performance data foundation optimized for AI innovation and success. Availability: Now

Register for Starburst Launch Point | May 28 (Virtual)

Join Starburst on May 28th for a virtual event where the company will unveil its vision for AI and walk through several exciting new announcements to its platform for data apps and AI. Attendees will hear from CEO Justin Borgman, Starburst product leadership, customers, and data professionals as they share product innovations and insights.

Register for EMEA/NORAM

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Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced the appointment of Jitender Aswani as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Aswani brings more than two decades of experience building and scaling high-performance technical teams, with deep expertise in machine learning, data infrastructure, and cloud technologies. In his new role, Aswani will lead Starburst’s global engineering organization and drive innovation across its modern data platform for apps and AI. He will report directly to Starburst CEO and Co-Founder, Justin Borgman.

Aswani joins Starburst with a proven track record of engineering leadership at some of the world’s most innovative technology companies. Most recently, he was Vice President of Engineering at StarTree, where he led engineering strategy and execution for distributed, multi-cloud real-time analytics platforms. He also served as the acting Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), overseeing the company’s security strategy and operations.

Previously, Aswani was Head of Engineering at Moveworks, leading teams that built AI-powered enterprise solutions. He held leadership roles at both Netflix and Meta, where he specialized in data science, security, and infrastructure. At Meta, he was one of the first users of Trino (formerly Presto) at Facebook, giving him a unique and valuable perspective on Starburst’s core technology.

Aswani’s experience spans early-stage startups to global enterprises, giving him a thoughtful approach to scaling teams and applying the right amount of process at each stage of growth. He holds multiple patents in machine learning, data management, and graph optimization, and earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.