Databricks Expands in Israel and Announces the Appointment of Yannis Daubin, VP SEMEA to Support Business Growth and Drive Customer Success

• Databricks invests in Israel, opens a new office in Herzliya, and bolsters the senior leadership team
• Yannis Daubin, industry leader from ServiceNow and Salesforce joins to drive further adoption of the lakehouse platform in SEMEA

Tel Aviv, Israel, 31 May 2023 - Databricks, the data and AI company, today announced the expansion of its business in Israel and the appointment of Yannis Daubin to VP SEMEA (Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa). Based in France, Daubin will bring extensive industry experience in international expansion from Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow. Daubin will oversee Databricks’ business operations in Israel, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and the Middle East/Africa region, driving lakehouse adoption with customers and expecting to increase the size of the SEMEA team by 50% over the next fiscal year.

With the surge in popularity of large language models (LLMs), the world has woken up to the vast potential of AI. The unparalleled pace of AI discoveries, model improvements, and new products on the market is encouraging every organization to prioritize their data and AI strategies. ​​With the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Databricks is enabling organizations to leverage AI to usher in the next generation of innovation. The lakehouse is an open and unified data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost-efficiency and scalability of data lakes with the data management features of data warehouses, enabling business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) on all data.

Databricks is supporting data-forward organizations such as Akamai, Comcast, Kaltura, Condé Nast, AT&T, Atlassian, Grammarly, Lusha, Riot Games, Zynga and Shell with their data and AI journeys. Over 50% of the Fortune 500 rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI, and Databricks runs on all major clouds, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Databricks expands in Israel, growing the leadership team to support customer base and nurture local talent

Israel presents a strategic opportunity for Databricks, which is why the company recently opened a new office in Herzliya and hired a dedicated country manager, Lior Tzabari. With a deep knowledge of the local market and experience from Cloudera, Vertica and HP, Tzabari plans to tap into local talent to grow the business and serve Databricks’ customers in the region. Databricks intends to invest further and expects to grow the headcount this year in Israel by 50% relative to the beginning of the fiscal year.

“I’m thrilled to be leading the Databricks team in Israel at such a pivotal point in history where business leaders in Israel are awakening to the power of data and AI,” said Lior Tzabari, Israel Country Manager, Databricks. “I firmly believe that data and AI adoption will accelerate our country’s already tech-savvy ecosystem of homegrown digital natives. Our Lakehouse platform and the surge in demand for effective and scalable AI strategies, makes us well positioned to support local customers on their data and AI journeys.”

“At Databricks, we are committed to being where our customers are, and there has never been a more exciting opportunity to expand into Israel,“ said Yannis Daubin, VP SEMEA, Databricks. “Some of our fastest-growing customers in Europe, such as OpenWeb, are based in Israel and we’re committed to supporting them as they transform their businesses with data and AI. We’re also working with partners such as KPMG Israel, and boutique system integrators (SIs), such as MatrixDnA and Aztek, to drive lakehouse adoption across Israel’s most data-forward companies. The opportunity in Israel and across all of SEMEA is huge and I’m eager to see what we can achieve this year and beyond.”

Speeding up the time to market for customers in Israel

Databricks works with leading digital native companies in Israel including OpenWeb, Nexar, Forter and Kaltura. Databricks customers in Israel are already seeing tremendous value in leveraging the lakehouse for data engineering, data science and ETL, and are increasingly investing in data analytics use cases.

“As a data-forward company, OpenWeb requires the right data stack to support its fast growth. That's why we decided to use the Databricks Lakehouse as our main data platform. This choice has enabled us to innovate faster and more efficiently. With Databricks and its wide range of features, we are able to serve different use cases and stakeholders quickly and provide increased value to our partners,” said Itai Av-Revaya, Senior Director of Data Engineering and Analytics, OpenWeb.

Another customer accelerating growth with Databricks is Kaltura, whose migration to a lakehouse architecture is paying dividends. The company has already reduced its infrastructure costs and uses fewer man-hours to maintain its data architecture. In addition, support engineers can now get the data logs they need with five-minute latency, which helps them diagnose technical problems for customers more quickly than before.

“At Kaltura, we're on a mission to power any video experience for any organization. Millions of viewers benefit from our live and on-demand video SaaS solutions, and data plays a huge role in offering them the best experience," said Omer Kolodny, Data Engineer Team Lead, Kaltura. “Moving to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform helped us streamline our workflows and reduce costs. With Databricks and dbt, we’re confident about rolling out powerful new features for our customers.”

About Databricks
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 9,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Contact: [email protected]