Bengaluru: Qlik has announced a strategic partnership with Starburst aimed at helping enterprises transform fragmented data into governed, AI-ready intelligence.
The collaboration brings together Qlik’s data integration, replication, analytics, and agentic workflows with Starburst’s federated query engine, context layer, and agentic capabilities.
Through this partnership, customers will gain greater flexibility in how they query, move, prepare, and utilize data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
The partnership between Qlik and Starburst comes at a time when enterprises are increasingly looking to scale artificial intelligence initiatives but continue to face significant data challenges.
While AI models, applications, and agents are advancing rapidly, the underlying enterprise data remains distributed across multiple environments, including cloud platforms, data warehouses, data lakes, SaaS applications, and on-premises systems.
Centralizing all data often introduces additional costs, latency, compliance risks, and potential vendor lock-in. At the same time, leaving data fragmented without governance and shared business context can significantly limit AI effectiveness.
Through this collaboration, Starburst and Qlik aim to address these challenges by combining federated access, business context, governance, and data operationalization.
The joint solution enables organizations to query distributed data while maintaining consistent governance and context. Starburst provides federated access to data wherever it resides, while both companies contribute capabilities for preparing and transforming trusted data.
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Qlik orchestrates workflows and business logic, while Starburst serves as the execution engine across distributed environments.
In addition, Qlik supports replication, analytics, and operationalization of enterprise data for both business intelligence and AI applications.
Together, the companies seek to help enterprises maintain data in its preferred location, move it only when business value justifies it, and ensure AI systems operate with trusted and governed context.
James Fisher, Chief Strategy Officer at Qlik, said: “The bottleneck for enterprise AI isn’t the models — it’s the data architectures they’re asked to work with. Fragmented, ungoverned data doesn’t just slow AI down; it makes the outcomes untrustworthy. What enterprises need is a way to give AI access to the right data, in the right context, with the right controls — without being forced into a single architecture or a costly re-platforming exercise.
That’s what this partnership will be built around. Qlik and Starburst give customers the freedom to keep data where it belongs, move it when it creates value, and trust what AI does with it.”
Matt Fuller, Founder and VP of AI & ML at Starburst, emphasized the importance of contextualized data for enterprise AI.
“Enterprises need more than access to data: they need AI that understands what that data means. Starburst gives customers governed, federated access to data wherever it lives, with the business context and semantic layer that makes AI answers trustworthy and consistent.
Together with Qlik, we give enterprises a practical path from distributed data to trusted business intelligence and AI, without unnecessary data movement, replatforming or vendor lock-in.”
Key Developments from the Partnership
Federated Access for Analytics and AI: Qlik and Starburst are developing integration patterns that combine Starburst’s federated access, contextual intelligence, and analytics capabilities with Qlik’s data integration, replication, transformation, and analytics technologies. The objective is to support trusted business intelligence and AI deployments across distributed enterprise environments.
Hybrid and On-Premises Reference Architectures: The companies have validated joint solution architectures that combine Qlik Replicate®, Starburst Enterprise, and Qlik analytics. These architectures are designed specifically for enterprises operating in regulated, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
Context for Business Intelligence and Agents: By combining the Starburst context layer, analytics, and agentic capabilities with Qlik’s strengths in integration, replication, transformation, and analytics, the partnership aims to provide business users and AI agents with access to governed data and shared business definitions.
AI-Assisted Data Pipelines
Qlik and Starburst are also collaborating on agentic pipeline capabilities that can translate natural language requests into optimized SQL workflows.
This functionality is expected to help data engineers accelerate pipeline development while maintaining validation, governance, and operational control.
For enterprises, the partnership delivers greater architectural flexibility.
Customers can continue using their existing data platforms, applications, and deployment models while gaining the ability to query data where it resides, move it when workloads demand, and preserve the lineage, governance policies, and business context required for reliable AI outcomes.
With the combined strengths of Qlik and Starburst, organizations can build a more governed, flexible, and AI-ready data foundation without requiring extensive data movement or large-scale replatforming efforts.
