We talked to Microsoft to understand the impact of their partnership with Databricks.

In December last year, Microsoft partnered with Databricks to bring Apache Spark based technologies to Azure customers and bring the Azure cloud to Databricks users.

To learn more about this partnership, I sat down with Mitra Azizirad, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Application Development, Data and AI Marketing @ Microsoft.

[You can also watch my interview with Ali Ghodsi, the founder of Databricks on The New Stack]

Azizirad said that there were two reasons for bringing Databricks to Azure. Microsoft very well knows that 80% of AI is around data. “We have a very strong data story within Microsoft. We understand how important Spark is within the community and in terms of our ability to really simplify and democratize AI for developers, data scientists and data engineers. We also want to make sure that we are making it available in a very simplified way for enterprise customers as well as developers,” said Azizirad.

Connect is an annual event targeted at developers and that’s why Microsoft chose the event to announce this partnership. Microsoft wanted to reach out to 9 million professional developers that are out there so they can see the opportunities that this partnership offered.

The two companies have been working together for a while and Azizirad felt it was the right time to formalize this partnership.

One of the critical pieces of this partnership was to ensure that there are integration points for enterprise customers in terms of security, compliance SLA and integration with Azure active directory. “All those things are part and parcel of first party service,” said Azizirad, “It takes time to ensure that it brings together all those integrated pieces together in a way that makes sure that enterprise customers understand that they have a top security compliance.”

Involvement with the Spark community: Microsoft has been doing Open Source for a long time, but things took a dramatic turn when Satya Nadella took over the helm of the company. Azizirad said, “We contribute very much into the open source community, we also accept contributions into our projects. We will continue to participate in all of them. This partnership doesn’t change anything.”

Why Azure needs Databricks: “It’s important for us to meet our customers where they are on their journey,” she said. If we look at it from the perspective of both developers — where they are in their journey from app development perspective — and customers —  on their journey to the cloud or where they are today. Microsoft needs to have offerings that meet them wherever that inflection point is for them.

“We need to make sure we have the components that make it a one-stop destination for simplified AI, and we would not be able to do that without Databricks. So it was very crucial to our strategy,” she said.

You can watch the entire interview on YouTube

Or you can listen to it on SoundCloud (don’t forget to subscribe to it)