GCP – Google Cloud named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave™: Data Management for Analytics Platforms

The rise of AI is revolutionizing data management platforms, where advanced automation, built-in data intelligence, and AI-powered data management are changing how organizations manage traditional tasks like data ingestion, data processing and governance.

We’re excited to announce that Google was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Management for Analytics Platforms, Q2 2025 report. In the report, Google received 5 out of 5, the highest score possible, across 13 different criteria. We believe this is a testament to our strengths in several key areas, particularly in delivering agentic experiences that automate manual tasks and accelerate gen AI use cases, built-in intelligence to unlock new insights from structured and unstructured data, real-time capabilities driving insights to action, and a secure and governed multimodal data foundation with governance across the data-to-AI lifecycle. 

According to the report:

Google’s distinctive and forward-thinking vision is to provide a unified, agentic, intelligent, and seamlessly integrated data platform that blends data management, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities at scale. The platform continues to evolve rapidly, focusing on advanced automation, open standards, global scale, self-service, and deeper integration with other Google services. The vendor’s roadmap is exceptionally well-defined, delivering a powerful strategic direction and alignment with AI positioned at its core.

Google placed furthest on Strength of Strategy and received above-average customer feedback in the evaluation, denoted by the halo around Google’s circle. Customers such as Dun & Bradstreet, Shopify, General Mills and many more choose BigQuery for its autonomous data and AI capabilities when building their data management platforms.  Let’s take a closer look at the capabilities that differentiate Google Cloud’s data platform.

Agentic and AI-assisted capabilities to power your analytics 

Data management isn’t just about storing and querying data; it’s also about intelligent automation and assistance. As highlighted in our recent announcements from Google Cloud Next 25, BigQuery has evolved into an autonomous data-to-AI platform, where specialized data agents, advanced engines, and business users can all operate on a self-managing multimodal data foundation built for processing and activating all types of data. With assistive capabilities powered by gen AI and integrations with Vertex AI for model building and deployment, you can reduce the complexities of data management and smooth the path from raw data to actionable AI-driven insights.

BigQuery’s AI-powered data management capabilities are designed for users of all skill levels. Data analysts can use natural language to query data, generate SQL, and summarize results. Data engineers can automate manual tasks like data preparation, building data pipelines, and performing anomaly detection to accelerate analytics workflows. Data scientists can use AI-driven notebook experiences and new engines to process complex data and support advanced analyses in real time. 

A multimodal data foundation with unified governance

BigQuery helps unify analytics across diverse data types by allowing data teams to build on an open lakehouse foundation. It combines highly performant native data management capabilities with support for open formats like Apache Iceberg, Delta, and Hudi. Multimodal support lets you store and analyze structured and unstructured data within the same table, streamlining complex analytics workflows. Finally, BigQuery’s universal catalog lets you work across SQL, Spark, AI, BI, and third-party engines, all with a flexible and open data lakehouse architecture, supporting interoperability.

Beyond the universal catalog, BigQuery data governance (powered by Dataplex) provides a unified experience for discovering, managing, monitoring, and governing data across data lakes, warehouses, and AI models. It also enables consistent policy enforcement, automated data quality checks, and comprehensive lineage tracking. Combined with a robust security infrastructure and fine-grained access controls, it helps you manage your data and AI assets with confidence, supporting compliance and building trust. Features like managed disaster recovery, enhanced workload management for aligning budget with performance needs, and flexible pricing with spend-based commitments further reinforce enterprise readiness. 

Built-in intelligence for real-time insights

BigQuery enables your teams to build and deploy machine learning models using their existing SQL skills. This helps to eliminate complexity and accelerates the adoption of AI across the organization. BigQuery’s integration with advanced AI models helps to extract insights from multimodal data in documents, videos, and images. Scalable vector search supports intelligent recommendations, while the new BigQuery AI query engine allows analysts to use familiar SQL and LLMs for real-world context when analyzing unstructured data. 

Real-time data capabilities are important for bringing fresh data to your AI models. BigQuery is designed from the ground up to support high-throughput streaming ingestion, allowing data to be analyzed as soon as it arrives. Real-time data combined with built-in machine learning and AI enables use cases like real-time fraud detection, dynamic personalization, operational monitoring, and immediate response to changing market conditions. Combining real-time data pipelines with the Vertex AI allows you to build and deploy models that react instantly, turning real-time data into real-time intelligent action.

Google is your partner for data to AI transformation

Google’s recognition as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Data Management For Analytics Platforms, validates our strategy and execution in delivering a comprehensive, AI-powered platform. Our focus on AI-driven assistance, a multimodal data foundation, and real-time intelligence helps to reduce manual data management tasks, so you can accelerate insights, and innovate faster.

As we evolve BigQuery into an autonomous data-to-AI platform, we are committed to helping you navigate the complexities of the modern data landscape and lead with data and AI. Thank you, our customers and partners, for choosing BigQuery to power your data management and analytics. Learn more about BigQuery today by visiting our website. Read the full Forrester Wave™: Data Management For Analytics Platforms, Q2 2025 report here.

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