Zhamak Dehghani inspired data professionals around the globe to adopt her concepts around data decentralization, and build data meshes and data products. Now Dehgani is productizing some of those insights with her startup’s first product, dubbed Nextdata OS.
In the ongoing, multi-decade war between the forces of data centralization and data decentralization, Team Decentralization is currently winning. Instead of struggling to build and maintain data pipelines that move data wherever it’s made to a centralized database, warehouse, or lake for processing, analysis, and AI model training, organizations are coming to the conclusion that it’s better to allow data silos to growth and then do your best to adapt to them, rather than continue throwing resources at overcoming the gravity of data where it sits.
During her time at Thoughtworks North America, Dehghani conceptualized a data mesh as a way for decentralized teams to work independently on common data sets, with some centralizing data governance provisions. The key insight that Dehghani– who was named a Datanami Person to Watch in 2022–brought to bear on the problem is that data transformation cannot be hardwired into the data by engineers. Instead, the data transformation step should be a sort of filter that domain-specific teams apply to a common set of data, thereby turning the data into data products.
Nextdata CEO Zhamak Dehghani
Dehghani left Thoughtworks and founded Nextdata in January 2023 with the goal of delivering a product that helps companies implement data mesh (a data mesh, like a data fabric, can’t be bought, but must be built by each organization). Earlier this month, Nextdata launched its first product, Nextdata OS.
According to the company, Nextdata OS functions as a unified platform for building and operating autonomous data products for AI, analytic, and agentic applications. These data products “encapsulate and automate the entire data supply chain in data product containers,” the company says. “They encapsulate and drive all stages of the data supply chain, from data ingestion, processing and modeling to automated quality and policy enforcement, streamlining and standardizing data product development for all use cases.”
These data products are self-governing, self-orchestrating, and self-publishing, the company adds, thereby reducing the amount of manual work that data engineers must do, streamlining development and reducing costs and risks along the way. The software will help users manage a range of data types, from tables to unstructured files, from vector embeddings to machine learning models. Nextdata AI agents will help customers create autonomous data products from existing data assets and pipelines, the company says. 
Nextdata OS will address the slowness, cost, and untrustworthiness associated with data management today, Dehghani said.
“Data teams are stuck wrangling brittle pipelines, outdated catalogs and reactive firefighting — all disconnected from the business,” she stated. “With Nextdata OS, we’re not offering just another tool–we’re delivering a simpler operating model. We’ve reimagined data management as autonomous, decentralized, self-governing data products–built to work with your systems and for you. It’s how enterprises finally scale-out self-serve data–with speed, trust and built-in safety.”
Nextdata OS is already being adopted by companies, including Mars Pet Nutrition, a division of Mars. “As data products become increasingly critical to organizations, the focus must shift–from tools to business outcomes, centralization to federation and cost to ROI,” the company’s Global Head of Digital Transformation and Strategy Rahul Shah stated. “Nextdata OS can accelerate this transition by driving data product ownership and transparency on performance and ROI. It restores confidence at the business level while leveraging existing infrastructure.”
Dehghani and Nextdata will be hosting a webinar at 8 a.m. PT on April 22 to demonstrate the new product. Interested parties can sign up here.
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Meet Zhamak Dehghani, a 2022 Datanami Person to Watch
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