Data Management For Analytics Platforms

"Teradata has exceptional analytics to support any use case." That sentence opened Forrester's citation for Teradata in the 2023 edition of this Wave. The 2025 edition kept the vendor a Leader for the third consecutive time, and the category it keeps winning is busy automating its own reason to exist.

A status note, because the flag said planned and the record disagrees. The Forrester Wave: Data Management For Analytics Platforms, Q2 2025, went live on 14 April 2025, authored by principal analyst Noel Yuhanna with Aaron Katz, Emily Doherty, and Jen Barton, scoring eleven vendors. The name itself is new: the 2020 and 2023 editions were published as Data Management For Analytics, and the word Platforms was added in 2025. The category decided what it is.

The newest edition: The Forrester Wave: Data Management For Analytics Platforms, Q2 2025

The evaluation scored eleven providers, and two placements are publicly confirmed.

Teradata is a Leader for the third consecutive edition, with the highest possible score in the vision criterion and top ratings in data integration, data transformation, in-platform analytics, and data modeling. Forrester credits a strong and differentiated vision for democratizing access to data and AI, a data fabric roadmap, and VantageCloud's flexible deployment across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid. The citation sentence from 2023 aged better than most vendor marketing.

Google Cloud joined as a Leader with the highest possible scores in thirteen criteria and the top strategy score of the field. Forrester's framing centers BigQuery as a unified, agentic, intelligent data platform with AI at its core, autonomous data-to-AI capabilities, and above-average customer feedback. The hyperscaler that turned analytics into a managed service now leads the scorecard for the category built around it.

The remaining nine placements sit behind Forrester's paywall, and no further tier announcements were publicly confirmed at the time of writing.

The incumbent that held through the cloud

The lineage runs Q1 2020, Q1 2023, and Q2 2025, all authored by Yuhanna, and it tells a specific story about survival.

The Q1 2020 edition, February 2020, evaluated fourteen providers and named Teradata a Leader with the top current offering ranking. The Q1 2023 edition, March 2023, evaluated fourteen providers again, and Teradata held. The Q2 2025 edition evaluates eleven, and Teradata still holds. Three scorecards, one winner, and the field around it got smaller and cloudier with every edition.

That is not loyalty. It is a product decision repeated three times. Teradata survived the cloud transition the way few on-premises warehouse vendors did: by making the same engine run across all three deployment models and by betting its roadmap on what the 2025 criteria now measure, genAI, real-time data quality, and sharing and collaboration.

The field's shrinkage matters as much as its winner. Fourteen vendors in 2020, fourteen in 2023, eleven in 2025. A category that narrows while its market grows is a category where the consolidation is happening inside the scorecard, not outside it.

The work that is being automated out of existence

Yuhanna's key-takeaways blog for the Q2 2025 edition describes what the criteria now reward, and it is the most honest job description in the category's history.

Generative AI is automating the functions this market used to sell as labor: data ingestion, cleansing, transformation, integration, governance, and security. Natural language interaction replaces query writing. Anomaly detection runs unsupervised. Vector search changes what search means. Built-in data intelligence handles the semantic tasks, detecting patterns, relationships, and trends that used to require an analyst's month.

The discipline was the product. Data management for analytics sold order: the warehouse, the model, the pipeline, the governance board. The 2025 scorecard scores who can automate the discipline. The warehouse was always the invoice. The order is the product, and the order is now a feature that runs itself.

Look at the confirmed Leaders through that lens and the placements explain themselves. Teradata wins on vision, data modeling, and in-platform analytics, the discipline made visible. Google wins on strategy, with a platform where most of the discipline is already automatic. Two different bets on the same transformation.

A Leader score for one is a loss leader for another

Here is the honest limitation of this edition, and it is about the vendors' business models more than their software.

The two confirmed Leaders do not sell the same thing. Teradata sells a platform license. Google sells a platform that drives cloud consumption. Both scores sit in the same Leader row, and they mean different things for a buyer's cost trajectory. A platform whose economics are consumption-based grows cheaper to run per query as the vendor's hardware fleet improves, and the bill still grows with your data. A platform whose economics are license-based is predictable and indifferent to volume, until the next contract negotiation. The scorecard does not price either model. The buyer must.

The second limitation is about evidence. The criteria now reward automation of governance and cleansing at a level of maturity the reference base has barely had time to reach. The 2025 scorecard measures platforms built in 2023 and 2024 on promises their own customers are still validating. The trend is real. The reference evidence is thin. Those two statements can both be true, and in this edition they are.

The third is the field itself. Eleven vendors is a narrowing bench, and a narrowing bench means fewer fallback options the day a Leader's roadmap disappoints. In 2020 the shortlist had fourteen names. In 2025 it has eleven. Plan the second choice before you need it.

Three questions that separate the platform from the bill

What happens to your cost at five times the data volume? If the vendor's product is consumption, get the five-x number in writing before signing. If it is a license, get the negotiation history from a peer at your scale. The Leader row contains both models, and only one of them matches your cost structure.

Who verifies what the AI automated? If ingestion, cleansing, and governance now run on agents, ask for the human-in-the-loop workflow and the audit trail of automated changes. For European buyers, the question has teeth: a data protection authority will want lineage an automated pipeline can reproduce, not a screenshot of a pipeline that ran itself.

What has this vendor's score done across three editions? The trend is the credential. The snapshot is the brochure. Teradata's three consecutive Leader placements are evidence of a product direction, not a feature list, and that is what you are buying.

The category added the word Platforms to its name because it stopped selling projects and started selling the thing projects run on. The Q2 2025 Wave scores that thing mid-transformation, with the discipline automating itself and the field narrowing around the survivors. Buy the trend, not the snapshot.

The governance layer this automation still has to answer to is scored in its own right in Semantic Layer Platforms, where Forrester finds eighty four percent of enterprises already run one despite there being no scored evaluation of the category at all.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.