Databricks Expands Leadership Team

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 28, 2017 — Databricks, the company founded by the creators of the popular Apache Spark project, today announced it has made two significant additions to its leadership team, welcoming Hatim Shafique as Chief Customer Officer and Rick Schultz as Chief Marketing Officer. Shafique joins Databricks from AppDynamics, where he was one of the early employees and was instrumental in helping the company grow from a handful of customers to a market leader worth $3.7 billion (acquired by Cisco); he will be responsible for the global post sales group fostering long-term customer relationships and supporting the company’s growing customer base. Schultz most recently ran marketing for Alteryx, which went public last week, for over four years; at Databricks, he will lead all aspects of global marketing as the company continues to build on the market momentum it has with its Spark-based Cloud product for Big Data Analytics and play a leadership role in the Spark community.

“As the creators of Spark, Databricks’ mission remains to make Big Data analytics easier for more businesses and use cases. In response to the rapid growth in our customer base and demand for the Databricks product, we are expanding our executive team to better service our customers and accelerate our global growth,” said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi. “Hatim’s track record of nurturing customer relationships, combined with Rick’s years of marketing success and expertise, made both ideal additions to our leadership team.”

Shafique brings more than 14 years of experience building enterprise software products and supporting global enterprises to Databricks. Most recently, he served as Chief Customer Officer and Senior Vice President of Tech Ops for AppDynamics, where he ran all the customer facing and technology functions for the company, supporting enterprise customers, global partners and employees. Prior to AppDynamics, Shafique held several development and QA leadership positions with CA Wily and other companies working on Java / J2EE products.

Prior to joining Databricks, Schultz served as Senior Vice President of Marketing at Alteryx, a leading provider of self-service data analytics, where he led the marketing efforts that fueled the company’s growth from 100 accounts to over 2,200 customers in under five years. With more than 20 years of leading enterprise software marketing teams, Schultz previously served as Oracle’s VP of Product Marketing for a $6 billion technology business that included Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, Security and Analytics. He also led the Java Platform marketing for Sun Microsystems during the early and rapid growth in the Java developer community.

About Databricks

Databricks’ vision is to empower anyone to easily build and deploy advanced analytics solutions. The company was founded by the team who created Apache Spark, a powerful open source data processing engine built for sophisticated analytics, ease of use, and speed. Databricks is the largest contributor to the open source Apache Spark project. The company has also trained over 40,000 users on Apache Spark, and has the largest number of customers deploying Spark to date. Databricks provides a just-in-time data platform, to simplify data integration, real-time experimentation, and robust deployment of production applications. Databricks is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. For more information, contact [email protected].

Source: Databricks