Review: Exasol Xperience 2025

On May 6 and 7, 2025, leading data and AI experts gathered in Berlin for Exasol Xperience at Hotel Telegraphenamt in Berlin.
The focus: data sovereignty, AI, and modern data platforms that help organizations make faster, more confident, and smarter decisions.

M2 participated as a partner and sponsor with its own booth – actively contributing to the exchange through insights from customer projects, personal conversations, and a panel discussion on data-driven acceleration.

Exasol showcased major product innovations – including Exasol V8, the new AI Lab, and significant advancements in performance, data sovereignty, and hybrid architectures. Engaging keynotes, panels, and customer presentations demonstrated how these developments are already making an impact in real-world applications.

What’s driving the industry right now – and which key takeaways we brought home from Xperience – you’ll find in our recap.

Agenda Highlights

• Vision & Key Market Trends
  Exasol is positioning itself clearly as an AI-native analytics engine – with a strong focus on performance, data sovereignty, and hybrid scenarios.
• AI in Europe & Data Sovereignty Panel
  Data Sovereignty was a central theme – especially in light of geopolitical developments and evolving regulatory requirements.
• Evolving Cloud Strategies
  According to a joint study by Exasol and BARC, 84% of organizations consider data sovereignty strategically important. Based on the study, 51% are turning to hybrid models, while 19% are deliberately moving back to on-prem environments to ensure controlled, compliant data usage – technically supported by Exasol’s flexible platform.
  Key drivers for this shift include new regulations, security incidents, and rising cloud costs.

• Customer Presentations & Best Practices

  • Customers such as Allianz, bank99, LBBW, Sparkassen-FI, and OTTO shared how they use Exasol in their organizations.

  • Use cases covered topics like migration, in-database business rules, semantic layers, and AI readiness.

M2 on the Panel: Turbocharging Data Analytics 

M2 took part in the panel “Turbocharging Data Analytics”, represented by Wolfgang Schult, who joined other experts from Exasol customers, partners, and users to discuss how data-driven acceleration works in practice.

Using a joint project with Labor Berlin as an example, Wolfgang Schult demonstrated how dashboards could be made 90% faster with Exasol – resulting in tangible improvements in operational planning and medical service delivery.
The key takeaway: speed only becomes truly valuable when combined with clear structure – through governed self-service with semantic layers, role models, and targeted enablement.

Product-Update: Exasol V8 & Roadmap

At Xperience, Exasol presented key innovations – including the latest version Exasol V8, an expanded AI Lab, and new integrations:

• Exasol V8 (available since June 2023) offers enhanced performance through Zone Maps, a new Join Optimizer, and faster parallel processing. Its new architecture enables storage-compute separation and snapshot backups, making it ideal for hybrid environments.

• The AI Lab enables in-database machine learning and GenAI workflows – with GPU support and integration with tools such as Jupyter and Hugging Face.

• The platform also introduced Virtual Schemas for Snowflake & Databricks, a new admin interface, and features for high availability and security.

• Looking ahead, Exasol is planning further enhancements, including deeper lakehouse integration, ARM support, vector capabilities, and extended admin UI features.

Conclusion & Outlook

Xperience once again made it clear:
AI offers tremendous potential – but only works with the right data infrastructure. And data sovereignty is increasingly coming into focus. Exasol provides the ideal platform – and M2 brings the expertise for architecture, enablement, and execution.

For us, one thing is clear: with Exasol as our technology partner and our fantastic team, we’re in the best position to keep accelerating data projects.