Better together? Why AWS is unifying data analytics and AI services in SageMaker

The integration of data and AI offerings at AWS and Azure, though, raises important questions about how they will adapt their partnerships with players like Snowflake and Databricks, Gupta said: “These companies, once central to data unification efforts, now face growing competition from the integrated offerings of the two cloud giants.”

While many technology vendors appear to be converging on the same unification strategy, Constellation’s Henschen said that AWS is a step ahead of Google, Microsoft, Databricks, and others. Microsoft’s Fabric and Google’s BigQuery have similar AI model development capabilities, he said, but they don’t yet have SageMaker’s inbuilt generative AI development capabilities.

On the other hand, Moor Insights and Strategy’s Jason Andersen sees AWS’s intentions with SageMaker differently. While at a high level the new version of SageMaker may resemble Fabric, AWS intends to offer a consistent experience for the entire data life cycle from data to model development, he said, comparable to a developer platform that offers tools to manage the entire software development lifecycle.