Databricks
Ambitious CEO Maps Course from Open Source to One of the Most Valuable Private Companies
“ZOOM’s data-driven process has helped us validate and go to market confidently as we create the data lakehouse category.”
Reason to Reposition
Commercializing Open Source, Disrupting a Multi-Billion Dollar Market
Ali Ghodsi, Databricks’ Co-founder & CEO, has leveraged ZOOM’s data-driven process twice to validate his bet on the company's future positioning. In 2017, it unified data science, engineering, and business. In 2020, it disrupted the market by combining data lakes and warehouses. Our challenge was to find the words that simply get across this new and powerful concept.
Defining a Breakthrough with Simple Differentiation
The breakthrough category: Lakehouse. Databricks owns and defines this category as "One simple platform to unify all your data, analytics, and AI workloads." It solves major pains like fragmented data architectures and silos, driving time and cost savings, increased productivity, and accelerated innovation. This differentiation aligned the company and guided their roadmap.
Business Results
Aligned the entire company around their positioning including sales pitches, product roadmap and company strategy
Grew to one of the largest private, venture-backed US companies at $43 billion
$1 billion ARR
Market Insights
Simplicity Speaks Volumes
Data-Driven Win
One simple platform to unify all your data, analytics and AI workloads
82% of customers & prospects really liked or liked
“Something that’s easy to use would be great because we have so many different places where logs need to be checked. It would save a lot of time and make our process less painful.” - Prospect
Why Simplicity Matters
The winner focuses on the important points of unifying; it’s is simple, specific and sets expectations for functionality and use cases
The losing concept requires explanation and sounds complex