Analytics vendor Databricks has opened a new EMEA headquarters in London. The new office in Baker Street, central London will enable the firm to more than double its UK staff and also open a customer briefing and training centre that will host big data meet-ups, machine learning workshops and introductions to “unified analytics” every month.
Ali Ghodsi (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Databricks, said: “We are proud to be playing a part in ensuring that London maintains its position at the epicentre of Europe’s tech scene.”
Deputy London mayor for business Rajesh Agrawal said: “It’s exciting to see an innovative and ambitious global company like Databricks choose London as its European base. With access to policymakers, growth capital, infrastructure, world-class universities and talent, London has everything you need to grow, nurture and scale a business.”
The Databricks Unified Analytics Platform makes it easier for enterprises to build data pipelines across various siloed data storage systems.
The firm saw over $100m in annual recurring revenue in 2018, with over 2,000 organisations now customers, such as Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell, Viacom and HP.
In related news, one of its key data management compliance partners is set to enter the EMEA market in a big way as organisations look to fully comply with GDPR. DataGrail, based in San Francisco, California provides Databricks with an independent SaaS-based system to help meet the data privacy requests of the end customers of the organisations it works with.
DataGrail helps make sure such requests are met through email preference management, data access and data deletion.
At last week's IT Press Tour in Silicon Valley, Daniel Barber, CEO of DataGrail, told IT Europa: “We recently signed our first European customer and are looking to open a European office this year, with the location to be confirmed. We currently manage the data of our customers' end users in the AWS cloud, and expect to extend this to clouds in European regions to address data sovereignty demands.”
