Constellation ShortList™ Hybrid-Cloud and Multicloud Analytical Data Platforms

This ShortList presents Constellation’s selection of hybrid and multicloud analytical data platforms delivered both as deployable software for on-premises and private-cloud environments and as managed database services across multiple public clouds. These deployment options enable enterprises to balance performance, cost, sovereignty, and resilience requirements while maintaining architectural consistency and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Beyond deployment flexibility, this ShortList focuses on platforms that deliver decision-grade analytical execution layers capable of supporting traditional BI and reporting through to modern AI-driven and operational decision workloads. Leading platforms deliver extreme query performance at scale, support high concurrency across users and workloads, and provide workload management, optimization, and operations features necessary to sustain predictable performance and cost efficiency in hybrid and multicloud environments.

These platforms also extend beyond SQL analytics to support advanced data science, machine learning, and AI use cases through native or tightly integrated support for non-SQL languages such as Python. Differentiation comes from enabling governed, low-latency access to analytical data for AI and decision intelligence and automation, including support for streaming or incremental data patterns, consistent governance across deployment footprints, and integration with modern AI application architectures.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

Hybrid and Multicloud Deployment

• Available both as deployable software for on-premises and/or private-cloud environments and as a managed database service on two or more public clouds
• Uses containerized or equivalent deployment architectures to deliver operational consistency, parity, and portability (features, performance, lifecycle management) across deployment models

Vendor-Operated Cloud Service and Support

• Vendor operates and supports its own cloud service
• Provides a single commercial and support relationship across software and cloud offerings

Governance and Management

• Integrates with enterprise governance, metadata, and observability tooling and enforces consistent security, access control and policy across deployments
• Provides mechanisms to manage cost, resource utilization, and workload efficiency across environments

Decision-Grade Performance and Concurrency under mixed workloads

• Sustains high performance and predictable SLAs under concurrent BI, applications and services, and ad hoc, operational, and AI-driven workloads
• Provides advanced workload management, isolation, and prioritization to protect decision-critical queries and ensure predictable performance and cost efficiency

Analytics, Data Science, and AI Readiness

• Supports advanced SQL analytics and native execution of data science and AI workloads using non-SQL languages (e.g., Python)
• Enables governed, low-latency access patterns suitable for AI-driven and operational decision workflows

The Constellation ShortList