Denodo, a leader in data management, announced that it has been placed as a top vendor in the 2025 Active Data Architecture™ report from Dresner Advisory Services. Dresner defines an “Active Data Architecture™” as that which “supports a platform-independent layer that sits between physical data stores and points of data consumption,” to overcome the challenges that many organizations have in maintaining the flexibility, adaptability, and scalability of their data infrastructures. For the second year in a row, Denodo secured the top spot in this highly competitive evaluation report based on its overall strength in data integration, metadata management, data governance, performance, and Active Data Architecture access. 

The complete, complimentary report can be found here. 

As the report states, “at its core, Active Data Architecture is an abstraction layer translating business and physical structures. It is an architecture dynamically optimized for performance, scalability, and cost management.” It later states that “in essence, an active data architecture provides (among other things) a layer of abstraction enabling data to be managed and applied in an application-independent manner. Arising from this concept of application-independent data is the notion of a semantic layer—an integrated, semantically aligned and consistent representation of data objects and views necessary for critical business processes and operations.” 

The Denodo Platform embodies the core principles and features of Active Data Architecture™ as defined by Dresner. Denodo employs a logical approach to data management, which enables organizations to manage data in an application-independent manner, without having to first replicate it. On top of that, Denodo offers a variety of data integration techniques, including real time integration via data virtualization; a universal semantic layer to provide data to multiple user groups in everyday business language; a full-featured data marketplace; advanced AI-powered data management features, end-to-end data governance and security, and support for governed, AI-ready data. 

“A key point about Active Data Architecture is that it is not a ‘rip and replace’ exercise,” said Howard Dresner, chief research officer, Dresner Advisory Services. “It is an evolution of existing analytic data infrastructure such as data integration capabilities, data warehouses, etc., to meet the requirements of ever more complex, diverse, and distributed BI and analytics use cases and applications. We congratulate Denodo on its rating as a top vendor in this report, for the second year in a row.” 

Part of Dresner’s Wisdom of Crowds^® Market Studies, the Active Data Architecture™ report is based on a survey of over 8,000 organizations worldwide as well as crowdsourcing and vendors’ customer communities. Dresner carefully verifies all respondent entries to ensure that only qualified participants are included. Business services and manufacturing make up the largest industries represented in the 2025 report, followed by technology. 

“We were extremely pleased to hear that the Denodo Platform was once again selected as a #1 technology provider for Active Data Architecture,” said Ravi Shankar, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, at Denodo. “The report mentions that 60% of survey respondents consider semantic layers to be ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ in Active Data Architecture, and with our logical data management capabilities, the Denodo Platform’s semantic layer is extremely powerful, reaching across lakehouses, and any siloed applications, to automatically translate data into everyday business language.” 

With this report, readers can glean key insights into vendor performance, to make educated comparisons against industry norms throughout their vendor-identification and selection processes.