Your organization’s ability to deliver trusted data is more critical than ever. But when your data platform vendor shifts direction — whether through product changes, rising costs, or corporate acquisition — it can create uncertainty for your data strategy.
This presents a key decision point:
Do you replace the platform entirely, or surround it with complementary capabilities to stay flexible and move forward with confidence?
The good news: you don’t have to choose between disruption and inaction. Leading organizations are successfully responding to this shift by pursuing one of two proven strategies: surrounding and extending it with modular solutions that solve today’s challenges while preserving tomorrow’s options or displacing the legacy platform altogether.
1. Surround and Extend to Stay Agile and in Control
In many cases, organizations don’t need to fully replace their existing investments to move forward. Instead, they enhance what’s already in place with modular, interoperable capabilities — improving data quality, governance, and automation without starting from scratch.
This “surround and extend” approach offers a smarter, lower-risk way to modernize the most critical parts of your data ecosystem without disruption.
Why modular extension works:
- Preserve continuity: Keep core systems intact while solving specific pain points like data quality, observability, address validation, or stewardship experience.
- Increase ROI: Complement existing platforms by filling capability gaps — improving usability and outcomes without overhauling infrastructure.
- Maintain independence and control: Keep your architecture open and future-ready, avoiding overcommitment to a single vendor’s evolving ecosystem.
- Move faster: Adopt modern tools incrementally, giving your teams quick wins and long-term flexibility.
The surround and extend approach may be right for you if:
- You’re already invested in a data management platform but need more flexibility
- You want to enhance business-user experience and automation without disrupting critical processes
- You’re gradually moving to the cloud and want to avoid a full rip-and-replace
- Your teams are calling for more intuitive, responsive tooling to support data governance and quality initiatives
2. Displace the Platform to Break Free from Risk
Sometimes, the best next step is a clean break. When a platform’s future is unclear, support weakens, or pricing becomes unpredictable, it may be time to transition to a modern solution built for agility, transparency, and trust.
Why displacement makes sense:
- Avoid vendor lock-in: If your platform is becoming increasingly tied to a broader tech stack that doesn’t serve your needs, full displacement returns control to your team.
- Accelerate your cloud strategy: Legacy systems can struggle to adapt to hybrid and cloud-native environments. Modern solutions are built to keep pace with your business needs.
- Improve time-to-value: Today’s data initiatives demand intuitive platforms that deploy faster, scale efficiently, and deliver measurable outcomes.
- Simplify licensing and operations: As consumption-based models become more complex, a transparent and predictable pricing structure becomes a clear competitive advantage.
The displacement approach may be right for you if:
- Your current on-prem solution is reaching end-of-support
- Your team is under pressure to simplify and standardize
- You’re frustrated with long implementation cycles or inflexible governance workflows
- Your organization is embracing a cloud-first or multi-cloud data strategy
How to Choose the Right Approach
Both strategies —surround and extend or displace— can help you reduce risk, improve outcomes, and stay aligned with your long-term data strategy. The right path depends on your organization’s readiness, priorities, and capacity for change.
Start by asking:
- Is our current platform helping or hurting our ability to scale with confidence?
- Where are we seeing the most friction — technology, support, cost, or user adoption?
- What’s the fastest way to deliver trusted, high-quality data across the business?
In many cases, surrounding the existing platform with modular solutions offers an efficient first step. For others, displacement may be the most direct route to modernization and cost control.
Let’s Build a Smarter Stack
Whether you’re seeking a fresh start or looking to enhance what you already have, the goal is the same: to deliver accurate, consistent, and trusted data to the people and systems that rely on it.
The next step doesn’t have to be disruptive. It just needs to move you forward, efficiently and confidently.
Ready to explore the right approach for your data strategy? Let’s start the conversation today.
