Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I talk about SAP’s new partnership with Databricks.
Highlights
00:29 — I want to talk today about why SAP chose Databricks from among, I’m sure, lots of different candidates for that highly strategic partnership, and also why Databricks is coming to the table, willing to invest $250 million into the ongoing partnership to ensure success for customers and ecosystem partners.
01:01 — This is really changing the nature of who SAP is. And I think on a larger scale, it also represents the evolution of all the big applications vendors. The requirements for AI now need to go beyond structured data within the SAP system. It also has to be able to tap into data from outside the SAP systems, all that unstructured data that’s so vital.
02:06 — Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said he believes that its lakehouse architecture enables the blending of those two — the SAP structured data and the non-SAP unstructured data—to yield the necessary fuel for the Business Data Cloud. SAP could do some of this on its own, but it required customers to tap into three different SAP solutions. So it pulls all of those together.
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03:25 — Also, about that $250 million investment, Databricks said its growth rate was 60% and that it is now at a $3 billion run rate. So for its most recent quarter, it is saying that its revenue was about $750 million and growing at an extremely fast rate.
04:28 — So while Databricks is not as large as any of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies, it is rapidly getting there — a company that’s gaining a lot of fans, a lot of interest. At different times over the past few months, Ghodsi has talked about the company’s desire to go public. We’ll see how that all plays out.
04:57 — But I think for now, the big news about this is that the addition of Databricks technology into the SAP Business Data Cloud unlocks enormous new potential for SAP customers. It seems like a great opportunity for Databricks to move into the big time more fully and for SAP to simplify what it offers to customers.
