European companies are generating and using increasing amounts of data, but the ability to turn that information into business decisions depends on the systems behind it. Fragmented databases, aging data warehouses and disconnected analytics tools can make it difficult to establish a consistent view of operations, customers and performance.
The economic importance of this infrastructure is growing. The European Commission’s European Data Market study estimated that the EU27 data market reached €90 billion in 2024, an increase of 9.7% from €82.1 billion in 2023. The study projected that the market could reach €100 billion in 2025.
The expansion reflects the growing role of data products and services across the European economy. For enterprises, it also increases the importance of infrastructure capable of supporting data integration, analytics and the development of AI applications.
Modernization, however, involves more than transferring databases to new infrastructure. Companies must consider how information is ingested, transformed, governed and accessed across business units. They also need to account for existing reporting processes, regulatory requirements and the cost of maintaining older systems during a transition.
Top data platform modernization companies in Europe
Organizations comparing data platform modernization companies in Europe should evaluate providers across several dimensions: architecture assessment, migration planning, data engineering, governance, cloud integration and support for analytics and AI. Experience with existing platforms is equally important, particularly when businesses need to preserve established data pipelines and business logic while introducing new capabilities.
A modernization project should begin with an assessment of the current data estate. This helps identify duplicated infrastructure, incompatible data models, dependencies between workloads and governance gaps. From there, companies can determine whether to consolidate platforms, migrate selected workloads or adopt a more incremental transformation strategy.
Sonata Software provides data platform modernization services through its Modern Data Platform Infrastructure offering. The service covers data assessment, architecture consulting, infrastructure migration and modernization, as well as platform scalability for data consolidation, processing and analytics.
The company also offers Microsoft Fabric services designed to help enterprises assess their readiness for the platform and develop a roadmap for adoption. Microsoft Fabric brings data engineering, analytics and business intelligence capabilities into a connected environment, making platform assessment and migration planning important considerations for organizations evaluating a transition.
The appropriate approach depends on the company’s existing infrastructure and business requirements. Some enterprises may benefit from consolidating separate data engineering and analytics tools, while others may need to modernize legacy workloads in stages to reduce operational risk. In both cases, governance, data quality and validation need to remain part of the process.
For European organizations, modernization decisions must also account for data access controls, privacy obligations and the ability to maintain oversight across increasingly distributed systems. A modern platform should make it easier to trace information, manage permissions and deliver consistent datasets to business users and AI applications.
The most useful measure of a modernization project is not the number of systems replaced. It is whether the resulting environment improves access to trusted data, reduces unnecessary complexity and gives teams a more reliable foundation for analytics and future AI initiatives.
