Report also slams multiple vendors for poor data integration and egress fees
Workday, Rippling, and Salesforce-owned Slack rank among the worst performers for enterprise data movement, according to a new industry benchmark tracking the speeds needed to power analytics, machine learning, and AI agents.
Fivetran, an enterprise data movement and integration vendor, has launched an Open Data Infrastructure (ODI) Data Access Benchmark to expose how enterprise software vendors handle - and hinder - data access.
The issue of getting data together from enterprise applications and services is a longstanding problem for anyone in charge of data engineering or analytics. The push for integrating Agentic AI with company data has, however, made it more pressing.
Last year Fivetran flagged that organizations pulling Salesforce data via third-party tools could face higher charges, part of a broader industry shift toward charging for API access. Salesforce disputed that contention.
It's an issue organizations should watch closely as they build AI agent systems, which depend on company data to generate meaningful responses. Most major vendors offer AI agents within their own platforms but getting those agents to work across different applications is another matter.
Fivetran's newly launched benchmark indicates a number of companies ranking poorly on its categories of data coverage, performance, and egress charges.
Among the worst on egress fees is Xero, an accounting SaaS for SMBs. Fivetran claims there is a "tiered monthly fees plus explicit API egress allotments and overage pricing" to get to the data.
Enterprise HR and finance SaaS provider Workday ranked worst for performance. Fivetran cites restrictive rate limits (~10 calls/sec, 100 records/response), slow API calls for large data volumes, and a reporting service that "lacks pagination causing large report failures."
The SaaS vendor also ranked second worst for coverage, with Fivetran claiming "access is gated behind complex domain security policies and some advanced analytics require Prism Analytics (paid add-on)."
A spokesperson at Workday told The Register:
"Fivetran's scorecard reflects a proprietary vendor perspective rather than an independent benchmark. Assertions regarding rate limits, response caps, and native Change Data Capture (CDC) are contrary to our official documentation, and the performance our customers experience in production every day. Workday's architecture is purpose-built to handle billions of transactions while maintaining the security and governance required for global compliance."
Worst for coverage is HR and payroll software Rippling, according to Fivetran. "Key objects are not accessible without special permission from Rippling," Fivetran said.
Salesforce-owned Slack collaboration platform gets a special mention. Fivetran says it is the fourth worst for coverage and egress fees, plus it is the second worst for performance.
The performance is affected by "restrictive rate limits (~10 calls/sec, 100 records/response); API calls for large data volume are very slow; RaaS lacks pagination, causing large report failures; no native bulk extraction or CDC support," Fivetran said.
The above companies did not immediately return our requests for comment.
Speaking to The Register in January, Fivetran CEO George Fraser said vendor pricing is publicly documented and can sometimes be negotiated down.
"This is about a lot of different data sources. When data sources make it difficult to get access to your own data, it just slows everything down," he said.
With some vendors, a number of projects never get off the ground because it is so hard to get the data, and the developers simply gave up, he said. ®