Lurking behind the headlines at MWC 2025 were various unsung technologies and products that play increasingly important roles in the AI and analytics surge. In some cases, they are tempering these headline trends or even acting in opposition to them. This is the case for the increasingly compute-intensive data handling required to serve complex queries and AI models. This processing can act as a constraint on inference and query, not just by imposing latency but also by failing to make all the available data accessible to the applications. This is the domain of the big analytics systems that grew up under names such as data warehousing, some of whose providers were present at MWC 2025. This includes IBM and HPE,…