More than 20 thousand customers – including more than 60% of the Fortune 500 – trust Databricks to detect fraud, discover new medicines, optimize their supply chain, personalize customer experiences, and more. And as customers ask us to expand our product, they’re also asking us to expand who we partner with to help democratize data and AI across their enterprise… No matter how fast we innovate, we’ll never be able to meet every customer’s needs alone.
This is where you – our ISV and data provider partner – come in. Together, we aspire to provide customers with any tools, models, datasets or agents they need, and help grow your business.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, then come together. -African proverb
In the 10 months since I joined Databricks to oversee our product ecosystem, I have had the privilege of meeting hundreds of ISVs, data providers, and startups. You tell me what’s working well and where we need to improve, and we value your feedback.
Today at our Partner Kickoff in Vegas, I’m excited to announce the first two (of many) improvements to our ISV and Data Provider Partner Program: a new Partner Tiering Program to better reward partners for their customer impact across multiple partner architectures, and a Partner Well-Architected Framework that gives clear, AI-ready technical guidance for building world-class integrations with Databricks.
Three partner architectures for ISVs and data providers on Databricks
At the foundation of these announcements are the three architectures you build with us.
1. related products are partner-built products that integrate with a customer’s Databricks platform to analyze, process, transform, and generate insights from their data. These drivers (for example, JDBC, ODBC, Python) and APIs are typically developed by AI, BI, data governance, data transformation, or other data-intensive tools, and now also include MCP servers that can be published to us. mcp market.
2. delta sharing The only “share to anywhere protocol” that allows data providers to share their data with customers on any platform, using any tool and powering any model. It’s zero-replicate, so you don’t have to replicate your data, and we manage all the cross-cloud networking and security complexity. Unlike the “walled garden” approach offered by other data platforms, we will continue to make Delta Shares work with any tools customers want. If the recipient accepts the stake in Databricks, it appears in their Unity catalog to use/join/query with the rest of their data, and it will also work in Excel, any major BI tool, Snowflake, and others. This is probably why Delta shares have surged more than 140% this year across the ecosystem.
3. built-on Solutions are built on top of Databricks, with Databricks serving as the foundational implementation behind the partner’s own front-end/API/intellectual property. This is the newest offering for us, and the one we are seeing the most demand for, especially as ISVs build agents and applications with Agent Bricks, Lakebase, and Databricks Apps.
Previously, we had separate teams with different incentives to partner in these architectures. This made sense as each new architecture was launched, as we had to test, measure, and learn what worked. What we learned was that many of you engage in more than one of these architectures and deserve to be rewarded accordingly, and you want better guidance on this*How* Building our integration to meet customer expectations and receive support from our region.
One Program, Three Partners Architecture
Our new Partner Tiering Program utilizes the same tiering structure as our Consulting and System Integrator programs, and measures the combined impact of all three partner architectures – combined number of customers, Databricks consumption ($DBU) impact, commitment to Databricks, adoption of strategic services and GTM readiness – to determine tier placement and rewards in a holistic, merit-based system.
What does it mean to you:
- Get credit for everything you create in connected products, delta sharing, and built-ons
- Get “extra” credits for building with Lakebase, Genie, and/or Agent Bricks.
- See how your architecture options translate into tiers, benefits and GTM support
We’ll share more with you about specific tiers and benefits during Q1 (February-April) and continue to make improvements based on your feedback before officially rolling out on or before Q2.
Partner Well Architected Framework: Building Better, Faster, Together
To provide you with better technical guidance and greater consistency/transparency in how we validate all partner integrations, we are publishing Partner Well-Architected Framework (PWAF).).
PWAF provides AI-ready instructional guidance for partners to build integrations that are secure and reliable, and includes tool requirements that allow us to measure customer adoption and $DBU impact – some of the key metrics that determine your tier placement in the Partner Program.
The best part is that we designed PWAF to be AI-ready from the ground up. In just a few clicks, you can use this guidance with Cursor, Cloud Code, Replit, or your favorite AI-assisted IDE/developer tool and navigate your way to a well-planned Databricks integration.
And, instead of just telling you what to do, we want to show you how. To support PWAF, we have created a fictitious company”Firefly Analytics“It’s designed to follow PWAF best practices and provide the scaffolding to get you started with a practical example. 100% Vibe coded, and (soon) 100% open source.
Point your devices to the PWAF and Firefly repo that’s coming soon and start building!
and we’re just getting started
This is the first of many improvements we are working on to help you grow your business by building transformational capabilities and delighting our joint customers.
Thank you for all your feedback in helping us build a better program, and we look forward to growing and building together this year!
Keep building,
—Stephen
(email protected)
