What is a Data Marketplace and Why Should You Use One?

Organizations today struggle with fragmented data landscapes where valuable information remains trapped in departmental silos, inaccessible to the teams that need it most. Data consumers face lengthy delays in submitting IT tickets and waiting days or weeks for access while lacking visibility into what data even exists across the enterprise. These bottlenecks slow decision-making and prevent teams from moving at the speed of business. Meanwhile, data producers spend countless hours responding to repetitive access requests and manual documentation tasks rather than focusing on strategic initiatives. 

Without centralized visibility, organizations inadvertently create duplicate datasets, waste resources on redundant efforts, and struggle to maintain consistent data quality standards. The result? Business users can’t assess data trustworthiness before requesting access, leading to decisions based on unreliable information and missed opportunities to drive real business value. That’s where enterprise data marketplaces can help.

Let’s take a closer look at what an enterprise data marketplace is, how it works, and why businesses need one.

What is a Data Marketplace?

An enterprise data marketplace is a centralized platform where data products are published, discovered, and shared across an organization. Think of it as an internal “app store” for data – different teams can browse available datasets, understand what they contain, request access, and start using them for analytics, reporting, or other business purposes.

The key idea is making data more accessible and reusable across the enterprise. Instead of data sitting in silos where only specific teams know it exists, a data marketplace creates visibility into what data assets are available, who owns them, what they mean, and how to access them. This helps break down data silos and enables self-service analytics.

These marketplaces typically include features like:

• Data cataloging – Automated discovery and metadata management so users can find relevant datasets.
• Search and discovery – Business-friendly search capabilities with clear descriptions of what each data product contains.
• Access management – Workflows for requesting and granting access to data based on governance policies.
• Data quality indicators – Information about freshness, reliability, and quality of datasets.
• Usage tracking – Insights into which data products are most valuable and who’s using them.

The marketplace model treats data as a product, with clear ownership, documentation, and service-level expectations. This encourages data producers to maintain high-quality, well-documented datasets and makes it easier for data consumers to find and trust the data they need.

Why Organizations Need an Enterprise Data Marketplace

Breaking Down Data Silos

Traditional data environments create barriers between teams, systems, and departments. Information remains locked within departmental databases, making cross-functional analysis difficult and time-consuming. An internal marketplace eliminates these silos by providing centralized visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enabling teams to discover related datasets regardless of their location within the technology stack.

Accelerating Time to Insight

When business users can find and access trusted data independently, organizations dramatically reduce the time from question to answer. Instead of submitting IT tickets and waiting days or weeks for data access, users browse available data products, evaluate their relevance, and request access through automated workflows. This self-service capability empowers teams to move at the speed of business rather than the pace of manual processes.

Ensuring Data Quality and Trust

Marketplace platforms integrate directly with existing data quality solutions, displaying trust indicators throughout the discovery experience. Users can assess data reliability before making access requests, viewing:

• Real-time quality metrics in search results.
• Data lineage showing transformation history.
• Trust scores influencing recommendations.
• Comprehensive quality dashboards.

This transparency enables informed decision-making while leveraging existing quality tool investments.

The Benefits of Using a Data Marketplace

Faster time to insights – Instead of spending weeks figuring out where data lives and who to ask for access, analysts and data scientists can quickly discover and access the datasets they need. This dramatically accelerates analytics projects and decision-making.

Reduced data duplication – When people can’t find existing datasets, they often recreate them, leading to multiple versions of the “same” data with conflicting results. A marketplace makes existing data visible, preventing redundant work and ensuring everyone works from consistent sources.

Better data governance – The marketplace enforces access controls and policies in one place rather than having ad-hoc permissions scattered across systems. 

Increased data democratization – Business users can find and access data without always needing IT or data engineering support. This self-service capability empowers more people across the organization to work with data, not just technical experts.

Improved data quality – When data products are published in a marketplace with quality metrics visible to consumers, data producers have an incentive to maintain high standards. Poor-quality data gets less usage, and feedback mechanisms help improve it over time.

Enhanced collaboration – Teams can see what data products other parts of the organization are creating and using, which often sparks new ideas and prevents teams from working in isolation. It creates a culture of data sharing rather than hoarding.

ROI on data investments – Organizations invest heavily in collecting and storing data. A marketplace ensures those investments actually get used across the enterprise rather than sitting idle in departmental silos.

A data marketplace enables organizations to move faster, make better decisions, and get more value from their data assets.

Transform Your Information into a Strategic Data Asset

Actian Data Intelligence Platform revolutionizes internal data commerce through a federated knowledge graph architecture that creates intelligent, multilateral relationships between data assets. This foundation enables:

• Automated data product management through continuous scanning and metadata synchronization.
• Dynamic, context-rich experiences that adapt to user needs.
• Integration with 75+ enterprise data sources, including Snowflake, Azure, AWS, Tableau, Power BI, SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, MongoDB, and Databricks.
• Seamless connection with existing data quality and governance tools.

Organizations can create marketplace experiences that transform traditional data catalogs into living ecosystems where teams collaborate, share knowledge, and drive innovation through trusted data products.

Getting Started With Enterprise Data Marketplaces

Implementing an internal marketplace begins with understanding your organization’s data landscape and user needs. Actian empowers data teams to start small and scale progressively, leveraging automated discovery and classification to build comprehensive data product inventories without extensive manual effort. The platform’s dual-application approach ensures both producers and consumers have tools optimized for their workflows, while knowledge graph technology creates the intelligent relationships that make discovery intuitive and effective.

Learn more about creating thriving internal marketplaces with the Actian Data Intelligence Platform or request a personalized Demo.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale, streamlining complex data environments and accelerating the delivery of AI-ready data. The Actian data intelligence approach combines data discovery, metadata management, and federated governance to enable smarter data usage and enhance compliance. With intuitive self-service capabilities, business and technical users can find, understand, and trust data assets across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Actian delivers flexible data management solutions to 42 million users at Fortune 100 companies and other enterprises worldwide, while maintaining a 95% customer satisfaction score.