Enterprise Strategy Group Economic Validation Finds Starburst Delivers 45% Lower Total Cost of Ownership and 414% ROI

Independent analysis shows reduced operational costs, accelerated AI initiatives, and significant performance gains

BOSTON, Jan. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Starburst, the data platform for apps and AI, today announced the release of an independent third-party Economic Validation Study: Economic Benefits of Starburst's Data & AI Platform conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), now part of Omdia. The report demonstrates that organizations using Starburst's Data & AI Platform can achieve a 45% lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over three years compared with alternative data platforms and specialized tools.

"Enterprises are under enormous pressure to scale AI and analytics without ballooning costs or adding complexity," said Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst. "This independent ESG validation confirms what our customers tell us every day: when organizations unify access to all their data—across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments—and eliminate unnecessary data movement, they can simplify architectures and reduce tooling, lower total cost of ownership at scale and ultimately move faster towards AI."

The analysis, based on customer interviews and ESG's independent economic modeling, found that organizations adopting Starburst significantly reduced infrastructure complexity, accelerated analytics and AI initiatives, and improved operational efficiency while scaling data access across distributed environments.

One Starburst customer interviewed for the report highlights these efficiency gains, noting that replacing an internally built solution with Starburst allowed them to delete 15 applications, and five cloud services and internal tooling methods, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

According to the study, ESG modeled a data-driven SaaS organization with $210 million in annual revenue and found that Starburst delivered a three-year return on investment (ROI) of 414%, driven by cost savings, improved productivity, avoided downtime, and faster time to insight.

Key validated findings from the ESG analysis include:

• 45% reduction in three-year total cost of ownership (TCO), compared with alternative data platforms
  
  
• 67% reduction in development and integration costs, eliminating custom connectors and tooling
  
  
• 65% reduction in data processing costs, including ETL, transformation, and egress charges
  
  
• 85% reduction in storage costs, enabled by query-in-place access and decoupled compute and storage
  
  
• 39% reduction in cloud and infrastructure spending, through improved price-performance and autoscaling
  
  
• Up to $1.7 million in avoided downtime risk over three years due to improved platform reliability
  
  
• Potential incremental revenue gains of $17.3M to $185M over three years from faster innovation and AI adoption

ESG found that Starburst's federated, open data architecture allowed organizations to access data where it lives, across clouds, on-premises systems, and data lakes, without costly migrations, reducing complexity while improving governance and security.

The report also highlights Starburst's impact on accelerating AI and analytics initiatives. Customers reported faster onboarding of new data sources, dramatic query performance improvements, up to 10x faster in some cases, and the ability to scale AI-driven workloads without proportional increases in staffing or infrastructure costs.

"Organizations are under pressure to extract more value from increasingly distributed data while controlling costs," said Aviv Kaufmann, Practice Director and Principal Validation Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Starburst Data Platform for Apps and AI provides a compelling combination of unified data access, improved price-performance, and operational efficiency that enables faster innovation with significantly lower total cost."

The full Enterprise Strategy Group Economic Validation, The Economic Benefits of the Starburst Data Platform for Apps and AI, is available from Starburst and ESG here: https://www.starburst.io/info/starburst-economic-validation-report/.

About Starburst

Starburst is the data platform built for flexibility, delivering fast, secure access to all your data, wherever it lives. Whether on-premises, across clouds, or in hybrid environments, Starburst provides choice and control to your architecture. Built on an open data stack with Trino and Apache Iceberg, it unifies distributed data without complex or costly migrations, unleashing the full power of the data lakehouse for analytics and AI.

With our Lakeside AI architecture, enterprises gain federated access, governed collaboration, and full data lineage, laying the foundation for scalable, compliant AI innovation. Starburst empowers data-intensive and security-conscious organizations to unlock the full potential of their data while ensuring performance, governance, and control.

Enterprises in 60+ countries, including Comcast, Citigroup, and 4 of the top 5 global banks, trust Starburst to maximize data value. Our strategic partnerships with AWS, Dell Technologies, NetApp and top cloud providers ensures seamless interoperability across environments.

From insights to action to AI, Starburst fuels innovation at every level. Learn more at starburst.ai.

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