Databricks to bring its 'data lakehouse' service to Korea

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Databricks, a $38 billion big data analysis service provider, is coming to Korea with its “data lakehouse.”

“We believe we have a role to play in helping reshape the digital future in the post-Covid era and spur innovation across all sectors of the Korean economy,” said Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi during the company’s online press conference Wednesday.

Founded in 2013, the San Francisco-based big data and artificial intelligence (AI) company has about 7,000 corporate clients worldwide including Comcast and H&M, and is currently operating in Asia Pacific regions with its offices in Japan, India, Singapore and Australia.

Databricks’ local clients include HYBE’s Weverse Company, which runs K-pop fan community website Weverse, and game publisher Bagelcode.

As of September 2021, Databricks raised a total of $3.6 billion from investors including Amazon Web Services, Alphabet and Microsoft, with a corporate valuation of $38 billion.

Databricks offers its corporate clients their big data storage and analysis software, referred to by the company as its data lakehouse. According to Databricks, the data lakehouse software combines the ideas of data warehouses and data lakes.

Data warehouse and data lake are both big data management and analysis technologies, but have distinct differences in terms of functionality. While data warehouses specialize in analyzing structured data, data lakes store and process all sorts of data including structured and unstructured.

“Databricks’ lakehouse solution combines the best qualities of data warehouses and data lakes, so that you can bring the AI of data lakes with the BI — business intelligence — of data warehouses,” said Ghodsi.

The company aims to double the headcount in its local office over the next 12 months.

“As one of the largest markets in the Asia Pacific region, Korea is a natural expansion for us and a reflection of growing demand from businesses looking to adopt an open, modern lakehouse architecture and accelerate their cloud data strategy,” said Ed Lenta, senior vice president and general manager of Databricks Asia Pacific.

Databricks will cooperate with key local partners, cloud consulting company Cloocus and cloud service provider Megazone Cloud, the company said.

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]