Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during an interview for Bloomberg Technology television in San Francisco on October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks said on Wednesday that its software for storing and analyzing large data sets is becoming available in Google’s public cloud.
The launch opens a new growth channel for a company that plans to prepare for an initial public offering this year. At the same time, Google gains access to modern software that previously was only available through its two biggest rivals in the cloud in the United States, Amazon and Microsoft.
Databricks has also refined its software to enable customers to take systems running on Google’s cloud and move them to their local servers with minimal effort, said co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. Historically, Databricks is only available as a cloud-based service.
“We have been under pressure from customers for years to do this,” he said.
To get there, Databricks worked with Google engineers to modify their software so that it could run inside a virtual container, a lightweight alternative to the more traditional virtual machine software created by VMware. The software will run on a Google cloud service based on Kubernetes, a container management tool that Google launched under an open source license in 2014.
Kubernetes abstracts the underlying computing infrastructure, freeing programmers to do more innovative work, said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
The arrival of Databricks in the Google cloud market could cause an increase in the consumption of computing and storage resources in Google’s cloud, which is behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Snowflake, whose software stores a variety of data, added support for Google’s cloud in 2019, ahead of its initial public offering in 2020.
“We generate billions in revenue for cloud providers, so they need us,” said Ghodsi in an interview earlier this month. “We are the killer app.” Organizations rely on Databricks to process many different types of data, so they can be used in applications or exploited in data analysis tools, such as Google’s Looker.
Databricks and Google started discussing a collaboration two years ago. Ghodsi said he spoke to Kurian the week he joined Google, replacing former VMware CEO Diane Greene.
“Google was transformed after he joined,” said Ghodsi. “We even see the same team members we’ve worked with before, just the type of cadence and execution skill has changed dramatically, and it’s incredible to see.”
CapitalG, a corporate venture division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, participated in the most recent round of financing from Databricks, announced earlier this month. Databricks had been in negotiations with CapitalG for over a year, said Ghodsi.
Databricks exceeded $ 425 million in annualized recurring revenue in fiscal year 2021, an increase of 75% year on year, said Ghodsi. The company has more than 1,800 employees, according to LinkedIn.
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