Anil Bhasin, Vice President & Country Manager, Databricks India: All set to expand India operations of Databricks massively
Databricks, the data and AI company, has announced strong data lakehouse adoption in India and plans to increase its local headcount by more than 50 percent 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.
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, 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, an 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.
“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, Parle and many more are harnessing the value of their data and applying AI to optimize their business operations and drive innovations through the lakehouse platform. For Databricks, India has turned into a promising market and a key destination for carrying out its R&S activities.
“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’ve 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’m 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, Parle Products Pvt. Ltd.
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