The Modern Data Software Landscape: San Francisco Summer Sentiment

Our latest report in our data software series presents the key M&A takeaways from this June’s two anchor events of the enterprise data calendar: the Snowflake Summit and the Databricks Data + AI Summit. The market’s center of gravity is shifting from where data is stored and processed to where it is given meaning, governed, orchestrated, and priced for autonomous AI use. 

Key themes include:

• How the economics of AI have changed, creating a genuinely new software category around AI spend governance, model routing, and value attribution
• How context (rather than raw model power) is becoming the moat, making independent semantic, catalog, and metadata assets highly sought after 
• Why agent orchestration, agent identity and AI security are emerging as fundable sub-categories in their own right
• How governance is becoming core infrastructure, making vendors with credible compliance footprints disproportionately valuable as the keys to regulated-sector AI budgets

M&A impact:

A widening buyer pool is converging on sought after data platforms which is opening the window for well-positioned independents to transact on favorable terms.

This is the fourth report in our series on the Modern Data Software Landscape. find the previous iterations here: 

• The Modern Data Software Landscape (overview)
• Modern Data Software Landscape: Data context
• Modern Data Software Landscape: Data observability

Download the full report.

Should you have questions about the software sector landscape or wish to discuss your M&A strategy, our door is always open.