The IT Nerd

Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, announced a record FY25 close, driven by strong demand from enterprise customers:

• Grew net new customers by 20% and Starburst Galaxy customer growth by 76% year-over-year  
• Achieved record global sales, including significant growth in North America and EMEA
• Increased adoption of Starburst Galaxy, its flagship cloud product, by 94% year-over-year
• Signed the largest deal in the company’s history –  a multi-year, eight-figure contract per year, with a global financial institution 
• Increased ARR per customer to over $325,000
• Customers include 10 of the top 15 global banks 
• Selected by Dell Technologies to be the analytics query engine powering the Dell Data Lakehouse, the data platform for Dell’s AI Factory GTM

Customers around the world are partnering with Starburst to accelerate their AI journey. 

• An American multinational investment bank and financial services company serving millions of customers in over 100 countries, leveraged Starburst to build a near real-time anti-money laundering data fabric. This solution enables faster fraud detection with AI-driven models. Starburst’s federated query access allows investigators to analyze global transaction data instantly and without data movement, ensuring compliance with strict banking regulations.
• HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, “has been recognised for its groundbreaking use of data and AI in leading the industry trend in Hong Kong…A key initiative that contributed to HSBC’s success is the development of a virtual data lake utilising advanced data virtualisation technology powered by Starburst.”
• Vectra AI, a leader in threat detection and response across more than 120 countries, serves thousands of customers. Their platform uses AI to detect threats rapidly across public cloud, identity, SaaS applications, and data centers. Starburst’s data platform provides access to log data, accelerating queries, and network traffic monitoring, which power AI models that deliver high-fidelity threat signals, enabling security teams to respond to threats sooner and to stop attacks faster.

Starburst is the data platform for analytics, applications, and AI, unifying data across clouds and on-premises to accelerate AI innovation. Organizations—from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises in 60+ countries around the globe — customers rely on Starburst for fast data access, seamless collaboration, and enterprise-grade governance on an open data lakehouse. Wherever data lives, Starburst unlocks its full potential, powering data and AI from development to deployment. By future-proofing data architecture, Starburst helps businesses fuel innovation with AI.

Learn more at starburst.ai.

Here are some 2025 Technology Predictions about major developments Justin Borgman, Cofounder and CEO, sees in Data, AI  and Storage.

Instant Data Gratification – “Businesses will prioritize real-time analytics, delivering insights within minutes to keep pace with intensifying customer and market demand and competition. This shift will enable faster decision-making across departments, from marketing to customer service, giving organizations a competitive edge. Real-time data will become essential for companies aiming to act on insights immediately, transforming analytics from an ad hoc, retrospective tool to a proactive business driver.”

Accelerating and Scaling AI with Data Products – “Well-defined data products become a prerequisite for scaling AI workflows like RAG.  We all know that your AI is only as good as the data you feed it, and the importance of quality and governance will become more important than ever.  Furthermore, data products INCLUDE business context, which is so critical to your AI applications.”

The Rise of the Hybrid Lakehouse – “The resurgence of on-prem data architectures will see lakehouses expanding into hybrid environments, merging cloud and on-premises data storage seamlessly. The hybrid lakehouse model offers scalability of cloud storage and secure control of on-premises, delivering flexibility and scalability within a unified, accessible framework.”

SQL’s Return to the Lake – “SQL is experiencing a comeback in the data lake as table formats like Apache Iceberg simplify data access, enabling SQL engines to outpace Spark. SQL’s renewed popularity democratizes data across organizations, fostering data-driven decision-making and expanding data literacy across teams. SQL’s accessibility will make data insights widely available, supporting data empowerment.”

Modern Data-Driven SaaS Applications Will Be Built on Lakes Rather Than Warehouses – “New data applications will be built on the lake rather than traditional databases or data warehouses.  The reason is simple: SaaS companies care deeply about gross margins in the products that they offer and data lakes offer significantly better TCO and no vendor lock-in. Building an application on an object storage lake allows companies to leverage open formats like Iceberg for storage and open engines like Trino for compute.  The end result is an application stack that won’t break the bank and is proven to handle Internet scale.”

Starburst has offered up the following 2024 Technology Predictions about major developments’ The predictions come from what Justin Borgman, Cofounder and CEO, sees coming in AI/ML, Data & Analytics, Cloud and Storage. 

AI / ML

“Companies will prioritize minding the gap between data foundations and AI innovation. There is no AI strategy without a data strategy and companies will need to prioritize closing gaps in their data strategy; specifically, the foundational elements of more efficiently accessing more accurate data securely.”

Data & Analytics

“Two hot topics, data products & data sharing, will converge in 2024. Data sharing was already on the rise as companies sought to uncover monetization opportunities, but a refined method to curate the shared experience was still missing. As the lasting legacy of data mesh hype, data products will emerge as that method. Incorporating Gen AI features to streamline data product creation and enable seamless sharing of these products marks the pivotal trifecta moving data value realization forward.”

“Open formats are poised to deal the final blow to the data warehouse model. While many anticipate the data lakehouse model supplanting warehouses, the true disruptors are open formats and data stacks. They free companies from vendor lock-in, a constraint that affects both lakehouse and warehouse architectures.”

Cloud

“Cloudera missed the cloud era. Hadoop lives on and companies are finding more modern solutions, including more efficient on-prem storage, while building connectivity to cloud systems for analytics workloads.” 

Storage 

“All things make a comeback and on-prem storage is having a resurgence. Companies including Dell have heavily invested in their EMC portfolio. Enterprise customers will continue to recognize that enhancing on-premise storage hardware presents the faster path to mitigating rising cloud expenses. This modernization will allow companies to manage data gravity for on-premise data that cannot be easily relocated, ensuring a more efficient approach.”