Cloudera named leader in Forrester's data lakehouse wave

Cloudera has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Data Lakehouses, Q3 2026. Forrester gave the company the highest possible score for vision and roadmap.

The assessment placed Cloudera among what Forrester described as the most significant providers in the data lakehouse market, based on its current offering, strategy and customer feedback. The report also described Cloudera as a strong fit for enterprises that need hybrid flexibility, governance, real-time analytics and operational control across large, regulated data environments.

The recognition comes as businesses continue to grapple with moving artificial intelligence projects from testing into day-to-day operations. Data lakehouse systems, which combine features of data lakes and data warehouses, are increasingly positioned as a core layer for managing the governed, accessible data needed for AI and analytics.

One data point cited by Cloudera highlights that broader challenge in Australia. According to Deloitte research referenced by the company, only one in four Australian organisations have moved more than 40% of their AI pilots into production.

Lakehouse focus

Cloudera said its Open Data Lakehouse is designed to bring together data management, governance and analytics in a single platform. The system is intended to help organisations work with complex, distributed data sets as they build AI applications and analytics services.

Forrester highlighted a broad set of product features, including zero-copy multi-engine access over governed data, real-time streaming, federated SQL, semantic and vector search, agentic AI workflows, autoscaling and enterprise observability.

Cloudera has placed particular emphasis on hybrid deployment, arguing that customers want to run data and AI workloads across public cloud, on-premises and sovereign environments. That approach is aimed at organisations in sectors where data location, compliance and operational control remain important purchasing factors.

Hybrid infrastructure remains a key dividing line in the market. While some software providers have shifted heavily toward public cloud services, others have maintained support for customers operating across multiple environments, including private data centres and edge systems.

AI production push

The debate over data architecture has intensified as companies try to make AI systems usable in live business settings rather than isolated pilots. In practice, that has drawn more attention to data quality, lineage, access controls and the ability to serve fresh data to models and applications.

Cloudera argued that effective AI agents rely not only on models but also on trusted, contextual data, supported by clear lineage, real-time access and security controls. Those issues have become central as companies weigh how to use AI tools without creating additional operational or regulatory risk.

Across the data market, vendors have responded by reshaping their products around AI workloads, often adding vector search, semantic layers and workflow tooling to connect large language models with enterprise data sources. Competition is increasingly focused on how well platforms can support those functions while preserving governance requirements.

For Cloudera, the latest ranking offers an independent benchmark at a time when many data companies are seeking to link established analytics products to newer AI demand. The company has long been associated with big data and on-premises deployments, and has been repositioning its platform around hybrid data and AI use cases.

Its pitch is likely to resonate most with large organisations that do not want to move all workloads to a single public cloud environment. These buyers often include financial services groups, public sector bodies, healthcare organisations and industrial companies, where legacy estates and regulatory obligations can shape technology choices as much as product design.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Cloudera Chief Product Officer Leo Brunnick set out the company's view of the market.

"As organisations accelerate their AI strategies, the quality, governance, and accessibility of their data have become the defining factors for success. We believe being named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Data Lakehouses validates our vision of delivering an open, hybrid lakehouse that enables customers to bring AI to their data, wherever it resides. By combining enterprise-grade governance with the flexibility to deploy across cloud, on-premises, and sovereign environments, we're helping customers build trusted AI they can scale with confidence," said Leo Brunnick, Chief Product Officer, Cloudera.