Databricks launched Lakehouse Apps, an effort by the data and AI company to become more of a platform for cloud and data-driven apps.

The news comes as Snowflake, MongoDB and Databricks are all holding events in the next few days. There's a race to be a platform for data and AI applications amid generative AI and large language models. Data vendors are trying to be the "locus of modern, cloud/data-driven app development," according to Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen.

Henschen added:

"Snowflake and MongoDB are also encouraging customers to think of and use their products as platforms for building applications. So last year Snowflake acquired Streamlit, a company that offered a framework for building data applications, and it introduced lightweight transactional capabilities, which had been a bit of a gap. Similarly, MongoDB, which already had plenty of traction with developers, significantly increased its analytical capabilities, which was a bit of a gap. Databricks has announced several development partners, and I’m assuming we’ll see more in the way of native services from Databricks to meet transactional requirements."

Databricks said Lakehouse Apps are designed to enable customers to access applications that run within their Lakehouse instance with their own data. Lakehouse Apps will be available in the Databricks Marketplace in preview in the coming year. Databricks Marketplace will be generally available at Databricks' Data + AI Summit next week.

Databricks added that it will offer AI model sharing within Databricks Marketplace and curate various models for common use cases.

Key points about Lakehouse Apps include:

  • Lakehouse Apps can integrate with Databricks' customer data and use Databricks services with single sign-on.
  • Lakehouse Apps inherit the same security, privacy and compliance controls as Databricks.
  • Early development partners for Lakehouse Apps include Retool, Posit, Kumo.ai and Lamini. Those companies are focused on data science, AI and LLMs.

More:

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions

Roles

Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Analytics Officer

Tags

#dataintegration, #GenerativeAI, application development, #AI #CDO #CIO #CEO #Analytics