Databricks Expands Global Presence with Investment in Italian Market

Pioneer of the data lakehouse plans to open an office and hire top talent in Italy as it experiences over 100% YoY growth across the EMEA region

Milan, Italy – May 4, 2022 – Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the expansion of its global operations to serve the Italian market. With a third of its SEMEA business represented in Italian customers like Barilla and illimity, Databricks sees tremendous opportunity to expand into one of the region’s fastest growing countries, with plans to hire a growing local team of technical specialists, data specialists, sales engineers and partner managers.

The company is experiencing over 100% YoY growth in SEMEA and the EMEA region as a whole. In addition to its expansion plans in Italy, the company has local offices in France, as well as a growing footprint in Spain. Databricks has pioneered a simple and open architecture for data and AI - the Lakehouse - which brings the reliability, governance, and performance of a data warehouse directly to the data lakes where organizations already store their data.

Italy is at a tipping point for tech growth and Databricks sees an opportunity to help local customers lay the foundations to scale with data and AI. With well-established practices and resources, Databricks and a network of partners, is helping customers migrate away from on-premise legacy architecture to the cloud. Well known Italian brands across manufacturing, retail, FIS, energy and public sector are already seeing the power of the data lakehouse in motion. For example, high-tech banking group illimity, is leveraging the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to ingest core banking data and replace manual risky data analysis.

“As the first cloud-native bank in Italy, we have always embraced innovation and creating personalized interactions with our customers. But in order to achieve this, we had to find a way to manage the vast amount of data and to optimize our understanding of it to make informed decisions about the business and our customers, whilst also adhering to data compliance regulations. Databricks is the partner helping us achieve this.” - Renzo Rognoni, Head of Central Functions Solutions, illimity.

Databricks is also working with partners locally, such as Avanade, NTT Data Italia, BitBang, Cluster Reply and Data Reply to support customers to innovate faster with data and AI.

“We are delighted to be part of Databricks' SI partner ecosystem, supporting the company in its aim of helping more Italian businesses realize the power of the lakehouse platform. Our team's expertise in advanced analytics and AI-powered data services combined with our Databricks center of expertise allow us to help customers like illimity innovate faster with data and AI." - Marco Gatta, Partner, Data Reply.

"Thanks to our partnership with Databricks, we have strengthened our technological core and are able to offer our clients an end-to-end solution, with a strong innovative and advisory component. This expertise, combined with the company's strategic partnership with Microsoft, allows us to remain a leader in the world of Data & AI" - added Simone Scalabrin, Partner, Cluster Reply.

Guillaume Brandenburg, RVP Enterprise for Databricks SEMEA comments, “We are thrilled to extend Databricks’ footprint in Italy and build a world-class team who will help bring the power of the lakehouse platform to more data-driven organizations throughout the country, and the SEMEA region more broadly.”

“We are finding that many customers in Italy need support with Hadoop and data warehouse migrations. Working closely with partners, Databricks can help businesses of all sizes to fuel digital transformation with data and AI.”

The company has raised nearly $3.6 billion, and was valued at $38 billion, after the company’s Series H funding last year, which included investments from cloud leaders and strategic partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), CapitalG and Microsoft. The company previously reported to Bloomberg that it ended Fiscal Year 2022 with $800M in ARR, an 80% jump over the previous year. Databricks was founded by the original creators of popular open-source software initiatives including Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow.

About Databricks
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 7,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

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