Cloudera Named Leader in Forrester's 2025 Data Fabric Platforms Report

Cloudera has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Fabric Platforms, Q4 2025 report, marking a significant milestone for the data and AI platform company. The independent analyst firm evaluated 14 vendors across 26 criteria, assessing current offerings, strategy, and customer feedback. According to Forrester, Cloudera represents "an ideal choice for organizations that want robust data processing, scalable storage, and persistent data management to power modern business use cases."

Perfect Scores Across Critical Capabilities

Cloudera achieved the highest possible scores in seven evaluation categories: End-to-End Integrated Fabric, Unified Data Catalog, Real-Time Performance and Scalability, Vision, Roadmap, Metadata Management, and Agentic AI. This performance demonstrates the company's technical excellence across both current capabilities and future innovation. The report emphasizes that Cloudera's unified platform "integrates and orchestrates diverse data, delivering the scalability and flexibility needed to drive actionable insights across the enterprise."

Hybrid Cloud Strength Sets Cloudera Apart

What distinguishes Cloudera in the competitive landscape is its robust focus on hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. The platform enables organizations to deploy data fabrics across public clouds, private data centers, and edge environments without forcing data consolidation. This approach proves particularly valuable for industries with strict data sovereignty requirements or complex legacy system environments. Customers specifically highlighted Cloudera's seamless data integration and strong support for both batch and real-time processing.

Why Data Fabrics Matter Now

Data fabrics have become essential infrastructure as enterprises struggle with fragmented data across distributed environments. Rather than migrating everything to centralized repositories, data fabrics create a virtual unified layer that connects disparate sources while maintaining security, governance, and compliance at scale. This architecture enables self-service data access and provides end-to-end visibility across the entire data landscape. For organizations pursuing AI initiatives, a solid data fabric foundation has become critical to avoiding the failures that plague many enterprise AI projects.

"Being named a Leader reinforces our belief that the future of data management lies in unified and adaptive fabrics that empower organizations to manage and access their data anywhere," said Leo Brunnick, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera.

Decoded

This recognition arrives at a pivotal moment for enterprise data strategy. With research showing that up to 95% of corporate AI projects fail to deliver ROI due to weak data foundations, the spotlight on data fabric platforms reflects a market correction toward infrastructure fundamentals. Cloudera's Leader status, particularly with perfect scores in forward-looking criteria like Agentic AI and Roadmap, signals that analyst firms see data fabric architecture as the bridge between legacy systems and AI-ready enterprises. For organizations that have rushed into AI without addressing underlying data fragmentation, governance gaps, and accessibility issues, this report validates the need to step back and invest in unified data platforms. Cloudera's strength in hybrid deployments also reflects a broader industry reality: despite cloud-first rhetoric, most large organizations still operate in complex multi-environment landscapes where data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and existing infrastructure investments demand flexible architectures rather than cloud-only solutions.