Tech giants, startups and one company a Databricks co-founder dubbed “the coolest open source company” people haven’t heard of gathered this week for the open analytics platform provider’s annual Data+AI Summit.
During the event, the San Francisco-based vendor made news by revealing upgrades to its Mosaic AI unified tooling product for artificial intelligence and machine learning and the open-sourcing of its Unity Catalog, among other announcements.
Databricks CEO and cofounder Ali Ghodsi used the event to highlight the work of the company’s services-led partners, including global system integrators and regional ones, telling CRN US during a question-and-answer session that “there's no way we can actually do the work they do ourselves.”
“We are perfect complements,” Ghodsi said. “We both need to succeed together for Databricks to succeed. … Databricks would not be what it is without the GSIs and RSIs. And it's going to be key to our success going forward. … The AI revolution is not going to happen without the SIs.”
Databricks Data+AI Summit 2024
Databricks has more than 3,800 partners worldwide, according to the vendor.
CRN US scoured the Data+AI Summit 2024 floor for vendors doing some of the standout work around with Databricks. Those vendors include:
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft
- Cube
- Posit
Here’s more on the most compelling vendor partners working with Databricks on analysis and AI.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services joined Google Cloud, Microsoft, Nvidia and Salesforce as part of Databricks’ news that it has open sourced its Unity Catalog offering, which brings together data and artificial intelligence (AI) governance across clouds, data formats and data platforms.
The Seattle-based tech giant’s cloud is interoperable with Unity Catalog OSS, according to Databricks. AWS representatives were on site to talk about AWS AI services for intelligent document processing, delivering portability to open data lakes with Delta Lake UniForm, managing the cost for data and AI workloads with Databricks on AWS and more.
Beyond Unity Catalog, the two vendors made news earlier this year when Databricks received a Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRamp) High Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) for its cloud services on AWS GovCloud, which should allow government agencies and contractors to leverage Databricks offerings with highly sensitive private sector and public sector data, meeting the U.S. federal government’s compliance standards.
Databricks on AWS promises better price and performance and has thousands of customer implementations, according to Databricks. Databricks clusters support AWS Graviton instances, works with AWS single sign on (SSO), integrates with Redshift and works with AWS Glue, among other capabilities.
AWS has more than 130,000 partners worldwide, according to CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
Google Cloud
Google representatives attended Databricks Data+AI Summit 2024 to discuss the vendor’s Gemini large language model (LLM).
Other subjects discussed by the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant at Summit include how Databricks deployed on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can improve data preparation, training, tuning, inference and other AI and ML workloads, among other topics.
In April, Google revealed BigQuery native support for Delta Lake for delivery of data for downstream applications such as business intelligence, reporting and other downstream applications. Now, Databricks and BigQuery users can maintain a single authoritative copy of data that they can query with both tools without exporting, copying or using manifest files, among other benefits, according to Databricks.
Google Cloud has more than 100,000 partners worldwide, according to of CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs
IBM
IBM and Databricks maintain a level of coopetition – in May, IBM said that its Watsonx.data with Presto C++ v0.286 and query optimiser on IBM Storage Fusion HCI provided better price performance compared to Databrick’s Photon engine with equal query runtime at less than 60 percent of the cost.
But the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant has a number of integrations with Databricks, including allowing its Databand observability offering to work with Databricks for continuous Spark monitoring. IBM’s DataStage data integration tool also has a connector with Databricks to help with data movement and transformation.
The two have even joined on a recent funding round for data ingesting and pre-processing upstart Unstructured.
IBM has thousands of partners and is a member of CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
Intel
Intel is not just a partner of Databricks – the chipmaker has leveraged Databricks as part of the organisation’s move to the cloud, migrating data and analytics workloads to make a robust, connected data foundation and reduce infrastructure costs.
Representatives with the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor were at Summit to talk about the Tiber portfolio of enterprise software, services and products for AI, edge, cloud, trust and security.
Databricks can be used for autonomously optimising central processing units (CPUs), managing resources cost effectively, improving scalability, improving elasticity, streamlining Spark operations and more to enhance large-scale data processing and analytics for AI applications, according to Intel.
Intel is a member of CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
Microsoft
Although Databricks’ new AI/BI business intelligence tool puts it competition with similar products from Microsoft, the two vendors have a close partnership that extends to the Azure Databricks fully managed first-party service that puts an open data lakehouse in Azure.
Earlier this year, The Redmond, Wash.-based AI giant revealed expanded integration between its Fabric data platform and Azure Databricks, giving users the ability to create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item from the Fabric portal and a way to access lakehouses and other Fabric data items as a catalog in Azure Databricks.
During Summit, Microsoft held a session on how Azure Databricks can enable confidential computing for guarding sensitive data within hardware-based trusted execution environments, previewing upcoming support for Intel Confidential VMs on Azure Databricks and expansion plans for Confidential VM availability across various regions.
Microsoft has more than 400,000 partners worldwide and is a member of CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
Qlik
During Summit, Qlik revealed a new integration with Databricks AI Functions, allowing enterprises to access Mosaic AI functionalities without extensive infrastructure changes or specialised training.
The integration gives users of the King of Prussia, Pa.-based company’s business analytics platform access to Databricks sentiment analysis, classification and translation within the Qlik Cloud Data Integration workflow plus support for Databricks Vector Store, among other features.
Qlik also promises users the ability to leverage its Cloud Data Integration to provision AI-ready data directly into Databricks Lakehouse, automating the entire data lake pipeline without writing code.
Qlik has about 2,200 channel partners worldwide and 500 in North America, according to CRN US’s 2024 Channel Chiefs.
Informatica
Databricks named Informatica its Data Integration Partner of the Year during Summit 2024, giving the company kudos for integrating its Intelligent Data Management Cloud and PowerCenter Modernization Solution with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
These integrations between Databricks and the Redwood, Calif.-based AI-powered cloud data management vendor promises users a way to migrate existing data in on-premises warehouses to Databricks and build new data pipelines, according to Databricks.
The two companies’ partnership goes back about seven years, with the companies sharing hundreds of enterprise users, according to Informatica.
Informatica has a partner program for system integrators, resellers, distributors and other partner business models.
Dataiku
Dataiku is Databricks’ Innovation Partner of the Year – its second consecutive POTY recognition – due in part to integrations with the latter’s Data Intelligence Platform to allow business and technical users to collaborate on AI projects and accelerate AI adoption.
Representatives with the New York-based data science platform provider were on site at Summit 2024 to show how users can leverage Dataiku with Databricks to build an enterprise-grade AI application with few lines of code, plus using Dataiku to monitor toxicity, latency, cost, and bias in LLMs.
Users of both companies can integrate Databricks Foundation Model APIs as part of the Dataiku LLM Mesh, execute custom Python code recipes directly on Databricks clusters and perform other actions, according to Dataiku.
Dataiku has a partner program for resellers, service providers and other partner business models.
Cube
Just before the Summit, Cube revealed that Databricks’ venture arm participated in a US$25 million funding round meant to go toward improving its Cube Cloud universal semantic layer.
The San Francisco-based startup – founded in 2019 – bills this semantic layer middleware component as a way to unify business logic, centralise governance and security, improve query performance and integrate with any data endpoint.
Using the companies’ tools together allows users to make cloud data accessible to all data consumers with consistently modeled metrics and performant queries.
Cube launched a partner program for consultancies and other business partner models last year.
Posit
On stage at Databricks Data+AI Summit 2024, the company’s co-founder and chief architect, Reynold Xin, called Posit “the coolest open source company” people haven’t heard of – in part because it rebranded from RStudio in 2022.
The Boston-based vendor positions its tools as simplifying the deployment of open source data science work across enterprises, letting users share Jupyter notebooks, Plotly dashboards and interactive applications built with Shiny, Streamlit, Dash and other R and Python frameworks, according to Posit.
Using the companies’ tools together has the potential to cut costs on context switching, speed up data visualisation and sharing, and more. The future of integration for the two companies includes a single sign-on to Databricks in Posit Connect, according to Posit.
Posit offers a partner program for resellers and other partner business models.
