Databricks Deepens Leadership Bench Across Asia Pacific and Japan

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – March 24, 2020 – Databricks, the leader in unified data analytics, today announced Ed Lenta as the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), based in Australia. He joins industry veteran, Greg Taylor, who brings deep go to market cloud expertise to his role as Regional Vice President of Australia and Southeast Asia.

Lenta brings nearly 20 years of enterprise technology and leadership experience to Databricks’ regional operations and is responsible for teams in more than 20 countries across APJ. In his role, Lenta will expand customer-facing teams and support organisations with data teams accelerating innovation and achieving AI success.

“Databricks’ global expansion continues to reach new corners of the world to support data teams in new markets,” said Ron Gabrisko, chief revenue officer at Databricks. “The Asia-Pacific and Japan region is a particularly exciting market for us because of the broad opportunities to bring our data-driven solutions to a wide range of companies, from startups to global enterprises and government organizations. Both Ed and Greg’s years of industry expertise will drive our rapid growth across the region.”

Lenta joins Databricks from Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he led their business across APJ. Prior to this he helped build the AWS Australia and New Zealand and the Global Accounts businesses. In previous roles Lenta helped expand VMware from an early stage company to major platform provider, holding regional leadership roles in South East Asia and Australia and New Zealand.

Taylor joins Databricks after leading APJ for New Relic where his team grew the business at over 50% CAGR with both enterprise and digital-native customers across the region. Taylor has also held a number of leadership roles across ANZ and Asia with Marketo, BMC and Oracle. Taylor is a Non-Executive Director for WhiteSky Labs, an award winning Mulesoft partner which recently received an investment from Salesforce to accelerate the company’s growth across the Asian Markets.

“I am thrilled to be joining the regional leadership team at Databricks. In its short history, Databricks has helped organisations of every size, across every industry transform themselves through data and AI,” said Lenta. “But it’s still very early. While every company seems to understand the critical role that data and AI must play in accelerating innovation, staying competitive, and anticipating customers needs, very few have figured out how to do it successfully. I truly believe that Databricks has figured this out, and couldn’t be more excited to help make organisations in the APJ region successful.”

These executive appointments come as Databricks continues to develop its APJ business with the opening of offices in Sydney, Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore in June and the appointment of Bede Hackney as Databricks’ inaugural ANZ Country Manager in November. In Australia, Databricks’ customers include Atlassian, Healthdirect and Tabcorp.

Globally, Databricks has grown annual recurring revenue (ARR) well over 2.5x over the past year with a US$200 million revenue run rate, up from almost zero in less than four years. In October 2019, Databricks announced a US$400 million Series F round of funding resulting in a US$6.2 billion valuation.

About Databricks
Databricks helps data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. As the leader in Unified Data Analytics, Databricks helps organizations make all their data ready for analytics, empower data-driven decisions across the organization, and rapidly adopt machine learning to outpace the competition. The company’s global customer base has thousands of organizations including Comcast, Shell, Expedia, and Regeneron. Databricks is venture-backed and founded by the original creators of popular open source projects, including Apache Spark, Delta Lake and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Apache, Apache Spark and Spark are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.
Copyright © 2019 Delta Lake, a Series of LF Projects, LLC. For website terms of use, trademark policy and other project policies please see https://lfprojects.org.

Media Contact
Kristalle Cooks
Head of Communications
415-462-4907
[email protected]