Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks Inc., speaks during a television interview with Bloomberg Technology in San Francisco on October 22, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Databricks said Wednesday that the software is available for storing and analyzing large data sets in Google’s public cloud.
The launch opens up a new growth channel for a company aiming to be ready for an initial public offering this year. At the same time, Google is gaining access to a trendy piece of software that was previously only available through its top two US cloud competitors, Amazon and Microsoft.
Databricks has also refined its software to enable customers to use systems on Google’s cloud and move them to their local servers with minimal effort, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. Historically, Databricks was only available as a cloud-based service.
“We have been pressured by customers for years to do this,” he said.
To get there, Databricks worked with Google engineers to customize the software so that it could work in a virtual container, a lightweight alternative to the more traditional software software paved by VMware. The software will work on top of a Google cloud service, based on Kubernetes, a container management tool that Google released in 2014 under an open source license.
Cybernetes pulls out the underlying computing infrastructure, and encourages programmers to do more innovative work, said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.
The arrival of Databricks in the Google cloud market could cause an increase in the consumption of computer and storage resources in the Google cloud, which is lagging 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’re sending billions in revenue to the cloud vendors, so they need us,” Ghodsi said in an interview earlier this month. “We’re the killer app.” Organizations rely on Databricks to process many different types of data so that it can be used in applications or explored in data analysis tools such as Google owned by Google.
Databricks and Google first began discussing a collaboration two years ago. Ghodsi said he spoke to Kurian this week when he joined Google, replacing former VMware CEO Diane Greene.
“Google is being transformed after joining,” Ghodsi said. “We even see the same team members we’ve worked with before, just the kind of cadence and execution ability has changed dramatically, and it’s great to see.”
CapitalG, a corporate venture division within Google parent company Alphabet, participated in Databricks’ most recent round of funding, announced earlier this month. Ghodsi has been in talks with CapitalG for more than a year.
Ghodsi said database exceeded more than $ 425 million in annual recurring revenue in fiscal year 2021. According to LinkedIn, the company has more than 1,800 employees.
LOOK: Thomas Kurian from Google Cloud on the future of cloud computing