In January we wrote that DoiT acquiring SELECT validated the data cost intelligence category rather than closing it, and that the market would keep fragmenting because different buyers need different things. Since then, half of that has held up and half of it deserves a harder look.
Here is what has actually happened to the tools a data team would have shortlisted at the start of 2025.
DoiT acquired SELECT in January 2026. SELECT still sells under its own name, and its technology also ships inside DoiT Cloud Intelligence as PerfectScale for Snowflake. DoiT said at the time that contracts, pricing and support would not change, and the SELECT team still builds the product.
Flexera acquired Chaos Genius, alongside ProsperOps, in January 2026. Chaos Genius is now sold as Data Cloud Optimization inside Flexera One. The name is retired: chaosgenius.io now redirects to Flexera’s Data Cloud Optimization page, whose title reads “Formerly Chaos Genius”.
Salesforce completed its acquisition of Informatica in November 2025. Informatica was delisted and is now a wholly owned subsidiary.
Datadog acquired Metaplane in April 2025. Metaplane still sells under its own name, as Metaplane by Datadog, and Datadog said the deal accelerates its expansion into data observability.
Prefect agreed to acquire Dagster Labs in July 2026, and Dagster’s site now says it is part of Prefect. Both products continue, and both keep their names.
Fivetran and dbt Labs completed a merger in June 2026. Fivetran separately became steward of the open-source Great Expectations Core project after a May announcement, while Great Expectations announced the sale of its commercial GX Cloud product to FICO, and GX Cloud stopped being publicly available on June 1.
IBM folded Databand and MANTA, which it bought in 2022 and 2023, into its watsonx products during 2025: Databand into watsonx.data integration and MANTA into watsonx.data intelligence. The old product pages now redirect there.
Qlik’s acquisition of Talend, closed in 2023, has worked through to the product line, which has been Qlik Talend Cloud since July 2024. Quest renamed erwin Data Intelligence to Quest Data Intelligence in May 2026.
And outside acquisitions entirely, Soda relicensed Soda Core from Apache 2.0 to Elastic License 2.0 in January 2026, so a tool many teams chose specifically because it was open source is now source-available and cannot be offered to others as a hosted service. Releases from the older 3.x line remain under Apache 2.0.
The part of our January argument that was wrong
We said the space was fragmenting, not shrinking. At the vendor level that is not what happened. At least six acquisitions and a merger since the start of 2025 is consolidation by any reasonable definition, and the full count is higher still: the list above leaves out deals such as IBM’s purchase of Confluent and Fivetran’s of Census. It has also been concentrated: Fivetran now stands behind dbt, Census and GX Core, Flexera behind both Chaos Genius and ProsperOps, and Prefect behind both Prefect and Dagster.
The part that held
What has not consolidated is the reason buyers pick specialists in the first place.
A FinOps team still wants governance, budgets and accountability. A data engineering lead still wants to know whether an optimization will break production. A platform team still needs to understand how usage, lineage and cost interact. Those are three different questions, and no amount of corporate consolidation has merged them into one.
What consolidation changes is the shape of the answer. Where a buyer once assembled four specialists, they are increasingly offered one suite with four modules, and the modules are uneven. A cost tool absorbed into an IT asset management platform is now competing for roadmap attention with software licensing. That is not necessarily worse. It is different, and it is worth knowing before a renewal conversation.
What this means for a shortlist today
Check who owns each tool before you compare them. A common failure now is shortlisting two products that share a parent and treating the comparison as competitive. Prefect and Dagster is the clearest example. So is Qlik and Talend, which appeared as separate entries in integration comparisons for years after they became one company.
Ask what happens at renewal, not at signature. Acquired products usually keep their pricing and support on day one. The question worth asking is what the roadmap looks like in year two, and whether the team that built the thing is still building it.
Re-check open source claims. A license can change without the product changing. Soda Core is the same software it was in December; the terms on which you can use it are not.
Watch for products that are no longer sold the way comparisons describe them. It is an easy trap to fall into. Databand, MANTA and GX Cloud all still appear in comparison articles across the industry. GX Cloud is no longer publicly available, and IBM now sells Databand inside watsonx.data integration and MANTA as a feature of watsonx.data intelligence.
Where this leaves us
Seemore Data is independent, and we are not going to pretend that is a strategy on its own. What it does mean is that our roadmap answers to the people who own the Snowflake bill, not to a parent company’s other product lines. When the category consolidates, the useful question is not who is biggest. It is whose attention you have.
