SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Databricks, provider of the leading Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark™, today announced Vijay Gill joined the company’s leadership team as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Gill brings engineering leadership experience from Google, Microsoft, AOL, and most recently, Salesforce.
“As a Databricks co-founder, I am ecstatic to attract Vijay’s level of expertise to help us build the Unified Analytics Platform and grow the business. Vijay’s approach to enabling a culture of excellence, making data driven decisions, and refusal to comprise are key attributes that will keep our team customer focused, and attract a high level engineering talent to work with Databricks,” said Patrick Wendell, Databricks co-founder and vice president of Engineering.
Gill joins the company from Salesforce, where he was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering. Vijay led engineering efforts for the infrastructure platform, including data intensive applications, cloud platform data pipelines, telemetry, analytics, diagnostics and visibility. Most recently, Vijay played an integral role in leading engineering efforts for NoSQL data plane and service, artificial intelligence and Machine Learning Platform as a Service for Salesforce.
“Vijay joins us with a strong background in distributed systems from large innovative companies. Our already successful team of engineers are excited to learn from his expertise, and continue the work of building the platform that will make artificial intelligence a reality for all companies, not just the chosen few with unlimited resources. With Vijay’s guidance on our leadership team, we’ll be better positioned to execute on innovative ideas,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer at Databricks.
Gill was the General Manager and led the Global Network Services (GNS) teams for Microsoft Azure that supports the foundation infrastructure for Microsoft online services for consumers and businesses worldwide. Prior to joining Microsoft, Gill was the leader of the Backbone engineering, Architecture, Network Security and Network Labs at Google, and was responsible for the teams accountable for the network architecture encompassing the dark fiber network, optical, MPLS and edge networks, as well as the data center network design. Gill also held networking and engineering roles at AOL, AboveNet, and Verizon/UUNET.
“Engineering is the intersection of where business turns into reality. With all of the hype around artificial intelligence, Databricks is one of the only companies that is positioned to transform innovation into ground truth. The engineering team has demonstrated the ability to solve large scale problems for resource-constrained companies that are not able to obtain insights from their data. My previous teams depended on the Unified Analytics Platform for data processing – and the big differentiator was that it allowed them to focus on the business instead of spending time digging through data,” said Gill.
About Databricks
Databricks’ mission is to accelerate innovation for its customers by unifying Data Science, Engineering and Business. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark™, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business to build data products. Users achieve faster time-to-value with Databricks by creating analytic workflows that go from ETL and interactive exploration to production. The company also makes it easier for its users to focus on their data by providing a fully managed, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure that reduces operational complexity and total cost of ownership. Databricks, venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Battery Ventures, among others, has a global customer base that includes Viacom, Shell and HP. For more information, visit www.databricks.com.
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