Databricks Launches Partner Connect

Databricks new platform, known as Partner Connect, allows the data and AI company's partners to deliver native product integrations and build future data, analytics, and AI solutions on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.

A pioneer of the data lakehouse architecture, with a recent valuation of $38bn after their $1.5bn funding round, Databricks have designed Partner Connect to be a one-stop portal for customers to quickly discover a broad set of validated data, analytics, and AI tools, with easy integration into Databrick's Lakehouse Platform across multiple cloud providers.

Partners available to customers include Fivetran, Labelbox, Microsoft Power BI, Prophecy, Rivery, and Tableau. Airbyte, Blitzz, dbt Labs, and more are to be added in the coming months.

Trusted by more than 5,000 organisations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — the Databricks Lakehouse Platform unifies data, analytics and AI.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe, Databricks was founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow. Their mission is clear: help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems.

The challenge Partner Connect solves

Modern enterprises want to drive complexity out of their data infrastructure, adopting more open technologies to take better advantage of analytics and AI. The Data Lakehouse puts thousands of customers on this path, collectively processing multiple exabytes of data a day on a single platform for analytics and AI workloads.

The prime issue is that the data ecosystem is vast, and no one vendor can accomplish everything.

Every enterprise has a multitude of tools and data sources. These all need to be connected, secured, and governed to allow every user within an organisation to find, use, and share data-driven insights. Stitching this complex patchwork of tools and sources together has is a burden on the customer and on partners, making it complicated and expensive to execute at scale.

Databricks claim that their Partner Connect solves this challenge.

By making it easy for customers to integrate data, analytics, and AI tools directly within their Databricks Lakehouse. Partner Connect automatically configures resources such as clusters, tokens, and connection files for customers to connect with data ingestion, prep and transformation, and BI and ML tools. 

Speaking on the launch of Partner Connect, Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, said:

“With Partner Connect, we’re able to open up the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to partners in new ways that will make it much easier for us to collectively serve customers better. Partners will be able to directly reach Databricks customers with their solutions in the moment, and our sales and marketing teams will be able to collaborate closely to solve customer challenges.”