Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Technology television interview 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 becomes available on Google’s public cloud.
The launch opens a new growth channel for a company that aims to be ready for an initial public offering this year. At the same time, Google is gaining access to a fashionable piece of software, which was previously only available through the two most important rivals in the US, Amazon and Microsoft.
Databricks has improved its software to make it possible for customers to take over systems running on the Google cloud and move them to their local servers with minimal effort, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview CNBC on Tuesday. Historically, Databricks has only been available as a cloud-based service.
“We’ve been pushed by customers to do this for years,” he said.
To get there, Databricks worked with Google engineers to modify their software so that it could run in a virtual container, an easy alternative to the more traditional virtual machine software initiated by VMware. The software will run on top of 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 lead to an increase in the consumption of computing and storage resources in the Google cloud, which lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Snowflake, whose software stores a variety of data, added support for the Google cloud in 2019, ahead of the initial public offering in 2020.
“We sell billions of revenue to cloud providers, so they need us,” Ghodsi said in an interview earlier this month. “We are the criminal application.” Organizations rely on Databricks to process a lot of different types of data so that they can be used in applications or explored in data analytics tools, such as Google-owned Looker.
Databricks and Google began discussing a collaboration two years ago. Ghodsi said he spoke with Kurian the week he joined Google, replacing former VMware CEO Diane Greene.
“Google changes after it joins,” Ghodsi said. “We see even the same members of the team we worked with before, only the kind of cadence and the ability to execute have changed dramatically and it’s great to see.”
CapitalG, a corporate division within the parent company Google Alphabet, participated in the latest round of financing for Databricks, which was announced earlier this month. Databricks has been in talks with CapitalG for more than a year, Ghodsi said.
Databricks exceeded $ 425 million in annualized recurring revenue in fiscal year 2021, up 75 percent year-on-year, Ghodsi said. The company has over 1,800 employees, according to LinkedIn.
CLOCK: Thomas Kurian from Google Cloud about the future of cloud computing