Eager to unlock the value of your data? Have you heard about Data Marketplace?

If you’ve landed on the blog, certainly you have.

So, without any ado, let’s begin…

✍️ Introduction

We all would agree that enterprises struggled over the years with managing data, let alone driving insights from their treasure. To solve this persistent issue, initially, Data Catalogs were used. But it could only help the organisation with data discovery, developing an understanding about data, and data governance, which is like solving a portion of the problem, as consuming data at scale and deriving insights was still a challenge.

Enter: Data Marketplace.

Data Engineering has been exploring Data Marketplace for quite some time now. Though the construct is not new, the renewed need for consistent, secure, and reliable data has sparked fresh conversations about it. Discussions around its usability and scalability witnessed an upsurge in the domain.

So what exactly is Data Marketplace, and how does it empower the business in scaling? Is it any different from the traditional marketplace? In this article, we’ll attempt to walk you through the road less taken.

Let’s start from the beginning…

Data Marketplace is a platform construct that has revolutionised the way enterprises interact and utilise data assets. With the potential to transform the way businesses function by providing ready-to-use insights for business users, Data Marketplace gained popularity.

What is a data marketplace? The definition

Put simply, the Data Marketplace is a bridge between the data providers and data consumers. Data Marketplace architecture enables data providers to monetise the data and builds confidence in the data consumers to buy high-quality, secured, consistent, and accurate data to interact with. This centralised plane brings data providers and consumers together for innovation.

It is like going to a traditional marketplace and buying fresh fruits, groceries, etc. In exchange for your purchase, you are bound to pay the price, and similarly, the seller is bound to provide you with the items you paid for, viz FRESH.

Similarly, in the context of the Data Marketplace, data providers and consumers come together, forming an ecosystem where data buying and selling takes place.

“Data marketplace make it possible to share and monetize different types of information to create incremental value. By combining information and analytical models and structures to generate incentives for data suppliers, more participants will deliver data to the platform.” ~ Mckinsey

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📖 Related ReadsThe Data Product Marketplace: A Single Interface for Business

Benefits of a Data Marketplace

For modern enterprises, speed of decision-making for obtaining ready-to-use is critical to driving results. And for a pure business POV, this is what data marketplaces are enabling.

Furthermore, Data Marketplace empowers the user by providing sophisticated information about the data quality scores, user reviews and even sample datasets, allowing users to assess if the data is suitable as per their requirements. It also fosters collaboration between data providers and data consumers and facilitates data monetisation.

Here are some of the reasons why you need a Data Marketplace today.

Central hub for your data needs

Data Marketplace enables organisations to create a single source of truth for key business metrics, ensuring consistency across the business. It serves as a central hub providing data consumers with the self-service capabilities to search, browse, and evaluate the data assets. This facilitates the elimination of persistent challenges in modern data management, i.e., data accessibility and utilisation. Additionally, it abstracts the user from wandering in the data jungle, serving tailored data assets or data products that are customised to the persona’s needs, e.g., the marketing team and data science team can leverage the same data product on user analytics with crucial consumer information.

Enhanced data accessibility & discoverability

The diversity of data acquired from a data marketplace allows users to access data from a variety of sectors and industries. This external data complements the organisation’s internal datasets, enabling the consumers to make more comprehensive business decisions. Additionally, the dynamicity of the Data Marketplace allows data usage across the organisation. It enables greater data discoverability, improving data management and distribution.

Furthermore, these curated and business-ready data assets significantly increase the scope of innovation from the data engineering perspective, freeing them from the burden of managing data access requests and the hassles of traditional processing of acquired data. These Marketplaces provide users with the ability to preview the data before opting for it, making Data Marketplace even more usable as it empowers the users with context and puts data directly in the hands of the user in a usable shape.

Increased transparency

With a Data Marketplace, consumers can preview the data they are willing to acquire. This fosters a sense of credibility and transparency in the data providers. On the other hand, data consumers are assured that the data they are exploring aligns with their needs and is compatible. Moreover, most data marketplaces have set parameters for data, empowering the data consumers to access sophisticated information about the data quality scores, user reviews and even sample datasets and provenance of the data, fostering transparency.

Improved governance and compliance

Data Marketplace comes with inherited enterprise-grade data governance and security measures such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPPA. These regulation allows usage tracking, ensuring data producers and consumers comply with the required legalities. These capabilities of the data marketplace enable the data consumers to develop reliability and trust in the data, helping them to make decisions on the data they are accessing. Additionally, the role-based access control capabilities with data contracts and SLO monitoring serve as icing on the cake, making it a safe haven for both data producers and consumers, ensuring the right person has access to the right (sensitive) data.

Creates monetisation opportunities

Data Marketplace creates new revenue streams for the data provider organisation. Moreover, the consumer can also list their data and turn the tables, becoming a data provider themselves by means of monetising the data they acquired and adding their datasets on top of that. Additionally, the data consumers can use the data marketplace for their dynamic data requirements. This capability is particularly useful for startups where the data requirements are fluctuating. Not to mention, it is cost-efficient as it frees the consumers from the hassles of searching and validating data, instead focusing on analysis and deriving insights therefrom.

Connect and derive value

It creates standardisation, integrating seamlessly with your BI and AI environments — eliminating delays in realising ROI. Many of the available Data Marketplaces allow performance tracking, measuring the impact it is making on the business effectively. With a self-serve API, businesses can deploy builds in minutes. Depending on the persona, they can utilise its benefits, connecting to diverse file formats and data-sharing protocols and ensuring seamless integration across databases, cloud services, and analytics tools.

Besides, data marketplaces foster a community mindset by facilitating collaboration amongst the data providers and data consumers. It provides space for sharing insights, best practices, and use cases, fostering a community mindset that is collaborative, leading to the development of new data products and services.

These benefits make the life of data practitioners easy and allow them more time to focus on value-oriented tasks.

Why do we still require data marketplaces despite having catalogs?

So Data Catalogs, are you listening?

Until the recent past, data catalogs were considered enough, and people questioned why we need a marketplace if we have catalogues. Imagine a data catalog as a library's card catalog: it provides an organised index of all the books (data assets) available, detailing their titles, authors, and locations on the shelves. This system helps you discover what resources exist and where to find them, but accessing the actual content requires you to locate the book yourself.

In contrast, a data marketplace functions like a streaming service. Instead of just listing available content, it offers a platform where creators (data producers) can publish and manage their work, and users (data consumers) can easily browse, sample, and access this content on demand. This setup facilitates seamless interaction between producers and consumers, enabling efficient data sharing and collaboration.

While a library's card catalog (data catalog) is essential for organization and discovery, it doesn't provide the immediate accessibility and interactive experience that a streaming service (data marketplace) offers. Therefore, in modern data environments, especially those embracing distributed architectures like data mesh, a data marketplace complements a data catalog by enabling direct access and fostering a collaborative ecosystem for data utilization.

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📖 Related ReadsHow to populate a Catalog with freshly baked Data Products?

💡Though Data Catalogs can be considered as their predecessor, Data Marketplace made access to data, its usability, and collaboration between the data stakeholders much easier. With this, consuming data at scale and deriving insights turned into a breeze.

In short, Catalogs list and document data assets and focus mostly on metadata management, while Marketplaces enable users to access, request, and use data easily and allow users to rate, review, and interact with data assets. Additionally, Marketplaces empower domains to manage and share data as products.

Its versatility makes Data Marketplace applicable across a wide variety of use cases and with various industries and domains such as healthcare, retail and e-commerce, and financial services. Customised datasets help organisations make decisions backed by reliable data.

🤐 Let’s face it, if your team is still waiting on a 12-step approval process to access last quarter’s sales data, they might as well be using a pigeon instead of emails.

What are some of the effective data marketplaces today?

So are these for real? Of course. The data engineering domain is regularly stumbling upon one data marketplace in a few months’ gap. Here is our list of some of the data marketplaces that have lasted longer in the domain and created a brand value for themselves.

AWS data exchange

The AWS Data Exchange from Amazon transforms how data is exchanged by allowing users to browse through the data marketplace and find the most suitable datasets from multiple data providers. Once the user logs in, they get consistent and cloud-native access to data ready to be used. Despite its advantages, AWS Data Exchange simplifies dataset distribution and billing, it does not support dynamic, row- or column-level access control based on individual consumer entitlements out of the box.

Snowflake data marketplace

The Snowflake Marketplace facilitates a secure way for buying and selling datasets, apps, and AI products. It is essentially a data platform where consumers can make online or in-store transactions, providing real-time updates to the consumers on upgrades available from specific data providers. However, a major limitation for Snowflake data Marketplace is the lack of granular access control for shared data. So while it enables seamless data sharing without data movement, Snowflake marketplace lacks fine-grained row- or column-level access controls per consumer. This forces providers to create separate listings or views for different user entitlements, adding complexity and limiting scalability for personalized data delivery.

Data product hub on DataOS

The Data Product Hub unifies data consumption, irrespective of the data stack underneath. It democratizes access to trusted data and accelerates digital transformation across the enterprise. What’s more is that this isn’t just about democratising but also about ensuring that access is built on a foundation of trust and governance. By offering enterprise-grade security and compliance with attribute-based access controls, enabling providers to define and enforce access policies at granular levels, Data Product Hub reduces operational complexity and enhances scalability.

As organizations scale AI initiatives, having reliable, well-governed data is critical. Recognized in Forrester’s Data Governance Solutions Landscape (Q1 2025) & Gartner’s Hype Cycle in 2024, Data Product Hub streamlines data consumption with built-in governance, quality metrics, and seamless integration with APIs (including LLM APIs and GraphQL).

🛣️ The road ahead

Apart from becoming more relevant and powered with the most sophisticated AI, the data marketplace will start to act as providers of DaaS (Data as a Service). Data access and analysis will become increasingly real-time with the growing demand for reliable data. Data Governance will be prioritised ensuring quality, accuracy and compliance of the data. Robust integration to verticalised data will also see a surge in the time to come.

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FAQs

Q: Why do we need a data marketplace?

Ans: A Data Marketplace democratises the data assets across the organisations, enabling wide access and use, empowering the businesses to make data-driven decisions.

Q: Data marketplace and data exchange are different?

Ans: Put simply, all data marketplaces can be termed as data exchanges, but all data exchanges can’t be data marketplaces. While Data Marketplaces emphasise the transactional nature, data exchanges imply a more general sharing of data.

Q: Is there a difference between data warehouse and data marketplace?

Ans: While both the constructs fundamentally work with data, on one side, a data warehouse is an internal system used by an organisation to store and analyse its own data. On the other side, a data marketplace is an external platform where data providers can sell or share their data with data consumers.

Q: How are data quality, privacy, and security handled in data marketplaces?

Ans: Data quality is handled through checks and provider information, with some marketplaces using reviews. Privacy and security are ensured by following laws like GDPR, encrypting data, and controlling access.

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