Databricks channel chief encourages partners to consider specialisation

Databricks' new partner program Velocity aims to give more control to partners and adds consumption-based incentives.

The move comes following the data management and analytics platform vendor’s growth over recent years amid the increase of data-hungry artificial intelligence tools and a rapidly growing partner ecosystem.

Databricks Australia and New Zealand partnerships senior director Allyson Caruso said when she joined the company four years ago, there were just 23 partners across the region.

Today, there are 250 in ANZ and 5,000 globally.

Caruso said those partners were asking for changes to the incentives.

“A lot of our partners are thinking about the amount of funding that they get back from Databricks for these incentives and … creative ways to drive that back into customers, to help them do more,” she explained.

“It's just a maturity thing. You look at Databricks and how long we've been on this journey, and our programme continues to mature and get better.”

The programme’s previous incarnation was very focused on getting new logos and handing them off to Databricks, Caruso said.

“It was very much a one-off, 'here is your incentive for helping us do that'," she said.

"The new programme is based on seeing customer success - so they get a bonus up front, and then they get consumption rebate payments across a number of months after that, where we are seeing consumption tick up and customers getting value out of their investment."

Caruso suggested future changes were also on the table - particularly, a focus on specialisations - as the vendor matures. 

“I see that our internal go-to-market team will be very much focused on what partners are capable and in what area, whether that's migrations or AI or that horizontal focus," she told techpartner.news.

"I think partners are going to start adopting that,” she said, advising partners to think about how to prepare and align themselves with a specialty ahead of the start of the 2027 financial year.

AI set to dominate

Caruso said the growth of the platform’s popularity has also led to a new wave of Databricks-only partners, such as the UK’s Manuka AI, which expanded into ANZ last year.

“Some of these newer (partners), they're not digital-native; they're AI-native consultancies,” she said. 

“It's interesting watching (Manuka’s) business model. They’re very new into our ecosystem but they are solely focused on building out their consultancy around Databricks … they going to market with RFPs using Databricks to do those RFP responses and make those easier,” she gave as an example.

This trend was currently accelerating, Caruso said, to the point where there are partners leaving system integrators to start their own organisations built around Databricks.

She predicted that consultancies’ business being 80% migrations and 20% AI will reverse over the next two years.

This could also have broader impacts on the ways that partners themselves operate, she added.

“Partners are thinking about AI and how it’s augmenting how they're approaching customers, and the size of their business that they have from a resource perspective," she said.

"A lot of our partners’ ambition might be to grow to 40 certified Databricks people this year, but actually, they might not need that many people, because they can do some stuff with agentic AI and get more value out of resources as a whole versus just humans."