Quick Overview:

  • Usage of the six major cloud data warehouse providers has surged over the past five years as enterprises prioritize analytics and AI, according to an analysis by Domo. The company analyzed usage patterns from more than 4,500 customers globally on its data platform.
  • Domo found that cloud data warehouse usage more than doubled from March 2020 to March 2025—based on the share of data visualization and analytics products sourced from customers' cloud warehouses at AWS, Microsoft Azure, Databricks, Google Big Query, Oracle, and Snowflake. The share climbed from under 16% to more than 33%.
  • "We are at an inflection point where cloud data and data products are becoming critical infrastructure for the AI era," Ben Schein, Domo's senior vice president of products, said in the report. "People have been investing in these technologies for a long time," he told CIO Dive. "Now they are starting to see the value from those investments."

Deep Dive:

As enterprises continued to lay the groundwork for generative AI last year, inadequate data infrastructure emerged as a barrier to widespread adoption. Data silos hindered the integration needed for scaled applications, legacy pipelines slowed modernization, and returns on AI investments proved elusive.

Nearly two-thirds of enterprise data management professionals acknowledged their organizations are not prepared for the data demands of generative AI, according to a February report from Gartner. The research firm expects data deficiencies to cause 60% of enterprise AI projects to fail by 2026.

IT vendors have moved quickly to help enterprises close the data readiness gap.

ERP giant SAP deployed a data governance platform in February as part of its alliance with Databricks. SAP Business Data Cloud is a data integration offering that includes analytics tools, dashboards, and agentic AI capabilities.

"Business Data Cloud is the new center of gravity for business data," SAP CEO Christian Klein said during the company's Q1 2025 earnings call last month. "It unifies and governs all data, whether SAP or non-SAP, structured or unstructured."

As generative AI use cases proliferate, Oracle has made peace with its three largest hyperscale competitors through partnerships, placing Oracle cloud database servers inside AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud data centers.

"If a company is going to fully realize the potential of AI, they need to have their infrastructure and data in the cloud," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company's Q1 2025 earnings call last week.

Vendors' efforts in data integration are gaining traction.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company's April earnings call that consumption of its cloud-based analytics platform, Microsoft Fabric, grew 80% in the first three months of the year. "The amount of data in OneLake, our multi-cloud data lake, has grown more than sixfold over the past year," Nadella added.

Domo analyzed a metric called "card views," defined as "visualizations presented in desktop, mobile apps, embedded analytics, and scheduled emails," to filter out data sitting idle in the cloud that is not generating value.

"Card views indicate that someone is deriving some value from the data," Schein said. "If you load a dataset and no one uses it, what's the point? It's like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it."