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 Wednesday that its software for storing and analyzing large data sets is available in Google’s public cloud.
The launch opens a new growth channel for a company that aims to be ready for a first public offering this year. Simultaneously, Google accesses a fashion software that was previously only available through its two main rivals in the U.S. cloud, Amazon and Microsoft.
Databricks has also refined its software so customers can grab systems that run on Google’s cloud and move them to local servers with minimal effort, co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi said Tuesday in an interview with CNBC. Historically, Databricks was only available as a cloud-based service.
“Customers have pushed us to do it for years,” 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 launched 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 Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.
The arrival of Databricks in the market in the Google cloud could lead to an increase in the consumption of computer resources and storage in the Google cloud, which lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Snowflake, whose software stores multiple data, added compatibility with Google’s cloud in 2019, ahead of its initial 2020 public offering.
“We get billions in revenue from cloud providers, so they need us,” Ghodsi said in an interview earlier this month. Organizations rely on Databricks to process different types of data, so they can be used in applications or crawled 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 transforms after it merged,” Ghodsi said. “We see even the same team members we worked with before. The type of cadence and ability to perform has changed dramatically and it’s amazing to see that.”
CapitalG, a business risk division of parent company Google Alphabet, participated in Databricks ’most recent funding round, which was announced earlier this month. Databricks had been in talks with CapitalG for more than a year, Ghodsi said.
The data boards exceeded $ 425 million in annualized recurring revenue during fiscal year 2021, 75 percent more than the previous year, Ghodsi said. According to LinkedIn, the company has more than 1,800 employees.
I WILL SEE: Thomas Kurian of Google Cloud on the future of cloud computing