As businesses grow, their technology stacks evolve, often in complex and unpredictable ways. Tools become outdated, solutions become too costly, and emerging use cases sometimes require new approaches. This is especially true when it comes to managing the company’s data.
By now, the majority of companies recognize the value in moving their data out of their applications and on-premises databases to cloud-based solutions. But in the same way there were once many legacy solutions that solved specific data problems, today there are numerous cloud-based data platforms—such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric—for businesses to choose from.
While each of these platforms was originally purpose-built with a particular focus (for example, data science, data warehousing projects, etc.), at the highest level they all serve the same purpose: enabling businesses to use data in order to grow and satisfy customer demand. Better yet, competition among them promotes and even accelerates innovation and improvement—all of which is great for their customers.
So the question no longer is “Which cloud data platform is best for my business?” It should instead be “How can I enable my business to use multiple platforms and take advantage of the benefits each has to offer?” In fact, more and more organizations today are embracing the state of being multi-platform companies.
“The question no longer is ‘Which cloud data platform is best for my business?’ It should instead be ‘How can I enable my business to use multiple platforms and take advantage of the benefits each has to offer?’”
How companies end up with multiple platforms
You may believe you need one system, but that’s not always realistic. Everyone wants a simple, single solution, but in the real world you will often face multiple systems, tools, and approaches. As organizations grow, they evolve.
There are a number of reasons why businesses end up with multiple platforms:
- Multiple use cases: Big companies often have a lot of different use cases and teams working with their data. Given that different data platforms have their particular strengths, you might end up needing two or more of them to accomplish everything you need to. In fact, the bigger you are, the more likely it is that you’ll be using multiple platforms.
- Mergers & acquisitions: Your company might buy another company, or a larger one might acquire you. That other company won’t just be bringing their employees on board, but (at the start, at least) all the technologies they use in their day-to-day business operations. A company that’s only ever been a Microsoft Fabric shop could overnight find itself with Databricks in its tech stack.
- Cost considerations: Different cloud data platforms often have varying pricing models depending on workload types, storage needs, and compute costs. This means that sometimes it’s cheaper to do one thing on one platform, and another thing on a different platform. In many cases, this financial rationale alone justifies using multiple platforms.
- Team skillsets: The existing expertise of your team can play a role in which platforms you use. Different teams may have experience with different tools—for example, one group might have a background working in the Microsoft ecosystem, while another group may all be Snowflake certified. Rather than forcing large swaths of their workforce to train on entirely new systems, some organizations decide to choose or retain the platforms their employees already know best, even if this means going with multiple platforms.
- Vendor lock-in: In the same way that relying on a single cloud provider leaves a company vulnerable to pricing changes, service limitations, or shifting terms, so too can relying on a single cloud data platform. By spreading workloads across multiple platforms, businesses maintain leverage and flexibility—ensuring they’re not overly dependent on any one vendor. Instead, pursuing a multi-platform strategy helps companies stay agile and better positioned to negotiate, pivot, or innovate as the tech landscape evolves.
Iceberg makes multi-platform a valid option
When faced with the new reality of multiple platforms, your first instinct might be to consolidate onto a single one. But you should only do so if it makes sense—there’s no need to force it. What if you consolidate today, but down the road find you have a certain use case that is not possible, or is too expensive, with the single platform you landed on?
In the last few years there has been a technology development that makes going multi-platform much easier—the emergence of Apache Iceberg.
With Iceberg, which serves as a common storage mechanism, all of your data can be stored in one place, while the processing, cleaning, and querying of the data can happen in a different compute engine—whether it’s Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, or something else. This allows you to keep the underlying data in one place without copying it across environments, avoiding problematic data duplication.
Coalesce as the single user interface
Now the challenge becomes understanding how your data is flowing between these different platforms. People may be doing different projects on your various platforms, and you don’t want them turning into data silos.
This is where Coalesce makes all the difference. The Coalesce platform serves as the unified view of how all the data assets are flowing in your organization, including all your metadata, and allows you to see the end-to-end data lineage. You can start working on one platform, do whatever that platform is best suited for, then take the output and feed it into another platform that is purpose-built for what you’re trying to achieve.
The ideal architecture for a multiple platform scenario starts with Iceberg at the bottom as the data storage layer. The various compute platforms in your stack sit on top of that, doing whatever each does best. At the top sits Coalesce, serving as the common user interface across the whole estate, leveraging all your metadata to show how your data assets are being moved and processed in the organization.
In addition to a view into that end-to-end lineage, with Coalesce you get automated documentation and the ability to build things quickly and easily. With the introduction of our newest product, Coalesce Catalog, you also benefit from a robust, AI-powered data catalog that helps you discover, centralize, and govern all your data assets.
Regardless of whether or not your organization is currently multi-platform, ideally you invest in a transformation and governance platform that gives you the ability to be multi-platform when that day arrives, one that uses metadata as the “glue” to hold everything together. And when new cloud data platforms emerge, instead of having to go through a laborious training period to learn each one, teams familiar with Coalesce—which is already straightforward to use—can continue doing their work there without much interruption to their workflow.
With Coalesce as the command center for your entire data stack, you might even forget about the idea of consolidating altogether. Why bother? With Iceberg as your storage layer, all your data in one place, and Coalesce offering you a unified view, you now have the freedom and flexibility to use whatever tools you’ve chosen or have inherited.
A post-migration world?
So does this new data architecture paradigm mean that expensive and laborious data migration projects will become a thing of the past? Maybe.
Migration is usually a sunk cost, unless the costs between the old system and the new one are extreme. But the differences between these platforms in terms of cost and performance are often subtle, so it may no longer make sense to move data from one to the other. You may still have plans to migrate over time, but with the data architecture we’ve described above, you can do it on your own schedule.
A mission to bring more value to customers
Because of the rapidly changing dynamics of the modern data stack, you’re likely to end up adopting multiple cloud data platforms in your organization—and Coalesce wants to support you no matter what technology you’re using. We often hear from customers that even if we already support the platform they’re on, they want the security of knowing we’ll be able to support other solutions they may start using in the future. And so our decision to grow in this direction was obvious—not only for our own company growth, but in the pursuit of our mission to bring more value to more customers.
While we started with a deep focus on Snowflake, we’re expanding support for other leading cloud data platforms—including seamless compatibility with Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, and upcoming integrations with Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift—ensuring our customers can transform and govern data wherever it lives.
Here at Coalesce, we’re building for where you are today as well as where you’re going tomorrow. You’re free to choose the best platforms for your business, knowing we’ll be right there beside you. Because in a multi-platform world, flexibility isn’t a feature—it’s a foundation.
See Coalesce in action
Ready to get hours of development work done in minutes—no matter which platform you’re using? Book a demo with us to learn more.
Also, be sure to check out these demos by Josh Hall, Senior Product Marketing Data Engineer at Coalesce: