Databricks, the data and AI company, announced strong data lakehouse adoption in India and plans to increase its local headcount by more than 50% this year, adding roles such as technical specialists, sales and support engineers, and go-to-market resources, to its team of over 250, to support business growth and drive customer success. The company also announced the launch of a new R&D hub in Bengaluru later this year.
Across the Asia Pacific region, the company is experiencing 90% year-over-year business growth.
Databricks has pioneered the data lakehouse, which is an open and unified data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost-efficiency and scalability of data lakes with the data management features of data warehouses, enabling business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) on all data.
The company gathered data and AI experts and visionaries at its inaugural Data + AI World Tour in Bengaluru today, to connect, share best practices, and get a first look at the company’s latest product innovations. This includes the recent launch of Dolly 2.0, the world’s first open-source, instruction-following large language model (LLM), fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use.
Dolly 2.0 is a 12B parameter language model based on the EleutherAI pythia model family and fine-tuned exclusively on a new, high-quality human generated instruction following dataset, crowdsourced among Databricks employees. Databricks is open-sourcing the entirety of Dolly 2.0, including the training code, the dataset, and the model weights, all suitable for commercial use. This means that any organization can create, own, and customize powerful LLMs that can talk to people, without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.
Recently, Databricks also announced the appointment of Anil Bhasin as the Country Manager for India to drive further lakehouse adoption across the country. A tech industry veteran, Bhasin brings more than 30 years of experience to the role and joined Databricks from UiPath where he served as the Managing Director and VP of the company’s India and South Asia business. Previously, Bhasin was the Regional Vice President for Palo Alto Networks.
“I’m thrilled to be leading the Databricks India business at such a pivotal point in history where business leaders in India are awakening to the power of data and AI to transform their businesses.
I firmly believe that data and AI adoption will accelerate our country’s transformation to help India become the most data-driven economy by transforming enterprises to become more data- forward,” said Anil Bhasin, Vice President and Country Manager for Databricks India.
Data-forward companies including InMobi, Swiggy, Dream11, Air India, MakeMyTrip, Meesho, Narayana Health, Myntra, CRED, Parleand many more are harnessing the value of their data and applying AI to optimize their business operations and drive innovations through the lakehouse platform.
“Any travel product, almost always, is a very nuanced purchase – it’s very contextual and experiential by its very nature. Given that, the travel ecosystem has multiple variables that must be evaluated – in batch, and, more importantly, in real-time – before a specific set of products can be personalized and recommended to the customer. Databricks has been our trusted partner in unifying data to bolster our ML ecosystem, which helps us deliver quick and effective results in “near-real-time”. The Lakehouse Architecture has helped us launch multiple successful consumer-led innovations,” said Piyush Kumar, Vice President, Technology Development, MakeMyTrip.
“We have chosen Databricks Lakehouse Platform as our ideal modern data architecture because we wanted a unified data platform that eliminates data silos within our organization and achieves cost optimization with the increasing amount of data that we are collecting. I am confident that Databricks will be a key enabler in our overall digitization journey, powering faster business analytics to support and enable our business functions to make data-driven business-critical decisions and firm strategies, to ultimately delight our customers from all classes and age groups to enjoy our products to the fullest,” said Sanjay Joshi, CIO of Parle Products Pvt. Ltd.
Databricks also recognized and celebrated outstanding data teams and individuals using data and AI to transform their industry at the inaugural Databricks India Innovation Awards.
Congratulations to the winners of the India Data + AI Awards 2023:
- Data + AI Award for Disruptive Innovation: recognizes the data and AI team that embodies innovation and impact — creating new markets and value propositions by employing data and AI technologies, and inspiring the global data and AI community. Winner: MakeMyTrip
- Data + AI Award for Driving a Data-First Culture: recognizes the data and AI team that evangelizes the culture of data-driven decision making, delivering data into the hands of empowered users across the organization — making every team a data team.
Winner: Dream11
Data + AI Visionary Award for Shaping the Future: honors the data and AI team that recognizes the potential of data and AI to transform their organization, and turning that vision into reality, unlocking significant value for the business.
Winner: Meesho
Data + AI Award for Societal Impact: honors the data and AI team that spurs positive social change which benefits society at large.
Winner: Navi
Data + AI Award for Redefining Customer Experience: honors the team that leverages data and AI to deliver seamless, personalized and omnichannel customer experiences. Winner: InMobi