Highlights:

  • According to Minnick, Databricks aims to simplify the sales process for third-party companies by assuming certain legal and contractual responsibilities, thus alleviating the burden associated with those tasks.
  • Databricks is further broadening its partner network that utilizes Delta Sharing, an open-source technology for securely exchanging real-time data from lakehouses to various computing platforms.

Databricks Inc. recently announced the extension of their marketplace, which now includes lakehouse apps and artificial intelligence models.

According to Databricks, the marketplace expansion holds great importance as customers now utilize their Lakehouse Platform to run comprehensive applications and desire to delve into AI model development. Previously limited to data sets and data-based products, the marketplace can now cater to these evolving needs.

According to Joel Minnick, the Vice President of Marketing, “We are in the midst of an AI revolution that has come out of generative AI, and folks are trying to find not just data for their AI efforts, but also models themselves, so the marketplace won’t just be a place where I can acquire data and data products, but also now data applications as well.” The company provided no specific information regarding the number of applications available at launch.

Within the Databricks marketplace, applications can operate either on a customer’s instance or on Databricks-managed infrastructure, with the added convenience of single sign-on. The data remains securely within the customer’s account, enhancing overall security measures.

Simplifying Sales

According to Minnick, Databricks aims to simplify the sales process for third-party companies by assuming certain legal and contractual responsibilities, thus alleviating the burden associated with those tasks. He added, particularly in the case of startups, “one of the tricky things is how to onboard customers. They don’t necessarily have the staff to go through security and legal and commercial agreements at the scale that they need and it can be hard to connect securely to customer data.”

Sellers in marketplaces “will be able to inherit all the legal agreements and protections that come with Databricks and the apps will deploy right into the customer’s tenant,” Minnick added. Databricks will not negotiate provider-specific license indemnification terms, but it will contribute to defining “the specifics of how these relationships work,” he said. “We are still working with our partner community on what those details will look like, and that’s not something we’re necessarily ready to roll out just yet.”

Databricks is further broadening its partner network that utilizes Delta Sharing, an open-source technology for securely exchanging real-time data from lakehouses to various computing platforms. The company announced that Cloudflare Inc., Dell Technologies Inc., Oracle Corp., and Twilio Inc. have committed to sharing data between their platforms and other systems supporting Delta Sharing.