For Organisations with existing IT systems in place

If you already have other systems managing your Customer Relationships, Enterprise Resource Planning, other on-premises and/or cloud-based Software-as-a-Service needs, you may wish to get all your data accessible in one place. I've implemented this capability for organisations using Databricks, which is a service hosted (and paid for) on your preferred cloud vendors infrastructure :  Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.

Data is stored on each vendors BLOB storage, which typically costs single digit pennies per GB per month. You only pay for compute capacity used, which is charged in "Databricks Units" and is billed by the cloud vendor each month. The useful side effect of this is that you can use any of the capabilities of the platform (everything below the top line of the diagram below) and new features as they evolve, without ever having to negotiate licensing or pricing. With a "Serverless" configuration, the service switches off when not in use; it typically takes 5-6 seconds to start up for the first person who wakes it up.

The services I offer work through all the stages to set up the Databricks platform and to get Data Engineering, Data Analysts and AI specialists underway to capture data from source systems, and to provide secure and governed business value to the organisation. I engage all of:

• Procurement: to align to and execute sourcing via preferred buying frameworks

• Vendors: to help select industry specialist third party service delivery supplier(s) as desired

• Legal: to ensure compliance with your organisation legal processes and contract terms

• Finance: to provide budget estimates based on data and volume expectations, purchase processes and to agree payment terms

• Enterprise Architecture: to link Databricks into your existing IT infrastructure, identity platforms and database plus application platforms

• Information Security: to work with your IT Security team to ensure compliance with your security processes and protection obligations

• Data Governance: to work with Data Governance staff, setting up data access, management and reporting procedures.

• Data Protection: to ensure data is processed  in line with stakeholder expectations and corrective processes are in place if needed

• Training: to agree and source training for Data Platform, Data Engineering and staff using Business Intelligence and AI tooling

End result is Development, Test and Production instances set up and work underway to set up data ingests and to have BI and AI tooling use underway. Ultimately to deliver analytics, data applications and value to your organisation.