Databricks Launches Tech Partner Portal With Pre-Built Data Lakehouse Integrations

The new Databricks Partner Connect is designed to help customers scale up their data lakehouse systems by providing access to Databricks’ growing ecosystem of software developer and data provider partners.

Data lakehouse technology developer Databricks has launched an online portal to help customers discover data, analytics software and AI tools from Databricks’ technology partners and provide pre-built links to data lakehouse systems.

The new Databricks Partner Connect, which has been in public review mode, is now live with connections to Microsoft Power BI and Tableau data analytics tools, data integration software from Rivery and Fivetran, Prophecy.io’s data engineering platform and Labelbox’s machine learning data management software.

Software from Airbyte, Blitzz, Dbt Labs and others are in the pipeline to join the portal, said Joel Minnick, Databricks marketing vice president, in an interview with CRN, with others to follow. In the future the portal is expected to offer links to additional partner solutions, data providers and machine learning models, he said.

[Related: Databricks Confirms $1 Billion In Funding, Boosting Market Valuation To $28 Billion]

“It’s really to advance how we think about the ecosystem around the data lakehouse,” Minnick said of the Databricks Partner Connect launch. “What we want to do is bring all the rest of [a customer’s] data ecosystem to the data lakehouse architecture.”

With its Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Databricks has been a leading proponent of the Data Lakehouse concept that combines elements of traditional data warehouse systems with data lakes – huge stores of unorganized data – for a range of big data tasks including business analytics, data engineering, data science and AI.

Databricks has established partnerships with a broad range of big data technology developers and built links between their data management, data engineering, analytics and machine learning tools and the Databricks platform.

Minnick said the goal with the new Databricks Partner Connect is to make it easier for Databricks customers to discover what third-party tools work with Databricks Data Lakehouse and, with just a few clicks, establish links – even across multiple cloud providers – to get the cloud-based services they need.

The Partner Connect portal comes at a time when many customers are scaling up their data lakehouse projects and looking for ways to reduce complexity, he said.

“No one vendor does everything,” Minnick said. “What Partner Connect allows customers to do is make it much, much easier to connect these tools to their lakehouse.”

Databricks Partner Connect, which is offered to Databricks customers at no extra cost, will automatically configure resources such as clusters, tokens and connection files to link their Databricks lakehouse systems with data ingestion, preparation and transformation software, and business analytics and machine learning tools, according to the company.

Databricks also expects the portal will be used by customers who are already working with partners’ products, but looking for quick ways to link them to Databricks using the portal’s pre-validated solutions and pre-built integrations.

In some cases, the portal provides free trials of the partner offerings. But Minnick said the portal is not an online marketplace: Financial transactions are conducted through the individual companies.

“Building on our longtime partnership, Partner Connect enables us to design an integrated experience between our companies and customers,” said George Fraser, CEO at Fivetran, in a statement. “With Partner Connect, we’re delivering a streamlined experience that makes it easier than ever for the thousands of Databricks customers, whether they use Fivetran today or discover us through Partner Connect, to unlock insights in their data, discover more analytics use cases, and get value from their lakehouse faster by easily connecting hundreds of data sources to their lakehouse.”

“With Partner Connect, we’re able to open up the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to partners in new ways that will make it much easier for us to collectively serve customers better,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “Partners will be able to directly reach Databricks customers with their solutions in the moment, and our sales and marketing teams will be able to collaborate closely to solve customer challenges.”

Databricks has taken a number of steps in the last year to help customers adopt and expand their use of the Databricks platform. In October the company acquired Germany-based 8080 Labs, developer of the Bamboolib data science tool, in a move to provide business users with easier access to data analysis and AI applications running on Databricks. One year ago the company debuted its SQL Analytics software for running SQL analytic workloads directly on the huge stores of data in Databricks.

And earlier this year Databricks launched the Delta Sharing project to create an open-source data sharing protocol for securely sharing data across organizations in real time, independent of the platform on which the data resides. The initiative is part of Databricks’ open-source Delta Lake project.