Welcoming Stephen Orban as SVP Product Ecosystem & Partnerships

Partnerships are essential to helping our customers unlock the full value of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Today, thousands of partners are part of the Databricks ecosystem, ranging from startups building on our platform, to software vendors delivering joint solutions, to data providers bringing AI and data intelligence to life. Expanding and deepening this global partner network is critical to driving customer outcomes and real-world impact.

That’s why we’re thrilled to welcome Stephen Orban as SVP Product Ecosystem and Partnerships at Databricks. Stephen has a long history of helping companies build and scale successful partnership programs, including more than a decade leading cloud migration and partner programs at AWS and Google Cloud. At AWS, he invented and launched AWS Data Exchange, which now offers data from hundreds of providers. Since then, he’s grown both the AWS and Google Cloud Marketplace by delivering dozens of innovations and unique, long-term partnerships with the world’s largest and fastest-growing technology and data companies, including Anthropic, Dun & Bradstreet, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more.

Stephen will be instrumental in expanding our ecosystem to tens of thousands of partners. He’ll also be involved in our product development, ensuring that our partners’ roadmap and strategic plans are aligned with our own so we mutually grow and benefit. Among the immediate priorities are:

• Streamlining the process for new ISVs and data partners to list and grow in the Databricks Marketplace, ultimately ensuring our customers have access to what they need to build and scale data intelligence throughout their organizations. We’ve had long-standing partnerships with industry-leading ISVs that we're eager to deepen, and we’re excited to bring on new partners that can further extend the capabilities of the Data Intelligence Platform.
• Increasing access to more third-party datasets that our customers can use to pair with their own assets to improve the accuracy of data intelligence workloads. Whether it’s an enterprise’s supply chain data, financial data from S&P Global or geospatial data from Accuweather, we want to make sure it’s all available on the Data Intelligence Platform.
• Giving disruptive startups a launchpad to stand out in a hyper-competitive market. The future leaders in every industry will be built on data and AI, and make data intelligence integral to their operations. Our Built on Databricks startup program has already helped companies like Obsidian, Orby, Altana, and many more.

These big goals require exceptional leadership, and that’s why I’m excited Stephen is joining the team. He brings a rare blend of technical and field knowledge, having started his career nearly 25 years ago developing data and analytics capabilities for Bloomberg and Dow Jones, where he served as a practicing engineer and CTO. Stephen also brings a deep understanding of enterprise data and AI workloads and approaches every challenge through the lens of the customer.

In his first few months, Stephen plans to meet with at least 90 customers and 90 partners in 90 days to learn what’s working well, and what we can be doing better to unlock a world-class data provider and ISV ecosystem and marketplace. If you’re interested, email him at [email protected].