Databricks has partnered up with Microsoft to offer its Unified Analytics Platform on Microsoft Azure as an integrated service within the Microsoft portal.
Azure Databricks will make it easier for businesses to glean better information from their big data and implement artificial intelligence to analyse the information they hold.
“Our alliance with Microsoft is a major milestone for the growth of Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks.
“There’s a large base of Microsoft Azure customers looking for a high-performance analytics platform based on Spark – and Databricks is already the leading Cloud platform for Spark. These organizations will be able to simplify Big Data and AI with Azure Databricks.”
The platform brings together a collaborative workspace for data science and engineering teams to work closely with business users, analysing varied sets of data including batch, ad hoc, machine learning and deep learning, streaming and graph from Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Blob storage.
It's a fully managed service that Databricks says will save businesses significant costs, while offering the scalability organisations now demand. It's these customer requirements that shaped the development of Azure Databricks, Microsoft explained.
"Azure users will benefit from the fast and collaborative Apache Spark based analytics platform optimized for Azure, and through the integration with other Azure services, such as Microsoft Power BI, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Active Directory," John ‘JG’ Chirapurath, general manager of Data Platform Marketing at Microsoft said.
The integration of Databricks and Microsoft Azure offers businesses access via the Azure portal, making it simple to sign on and get started.
The news follows the launch of a new Databricks HQ in London last month, a move designed to take advantage of the UK's booming AI industry.
