Databricks has just made the announcement that it has taken possession of Okera, which produces a data governance system with an AI concentration. Neither reached terms for public dissemination for the exchange price. According to Crunchbase, Okera had managed to get in the neighborhood of $30 million from entrepreneurs such as Felicis, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cyber Mentor Fund, ClearSky, and Emergent Ventures.
Data governance, which has already been an important issue, has recently been highlighted as a result of the buzz around AI. Databricks remarked on this in a recent announcement. According to Databricks in a blog, traditional data governance techs necessitate the enforcement of control and for workloads to be in a ‘closed off area’ near the control layer. The old way of doing things is no longer applicable now that there are huge language models, because the amount of data is increasing rapidly (due to automation) and AI development is continuing to evolve faster and faster, so that traditional access controls can’t keep up with the rate of change.
Okera utilizes an AI-based system that can find and define private data, identify it and put into effect protocols for the metadata, without having to create any extra code in the process.
The Databricks team highlighted that this was one of the many factors that encouraged them to purchase Okera. The other big factor was the seclusion technology which is able to effectively implement management on varying workloads without requiring too much extra effort. Though the technology is not publically available right now, it is likely one of the key reasons why Databricks decided to acquire the company.
Databricks recently introduced LLM, and is intending to include Okera’s technology in the Unity Catalog, its current method of administrating data and AI. The company mentioned that the purchase will allow Databricks to provide new APIs that its data governance collaborators will be able to employ to give solutions to their clients.
Databricks is bringing Nong Li into the team through their acquisition of Okera. Li built Apache Parquet file format, and spent some time as an engineer at Databricks. He was then the founding CTO of Okera before taking on the role of CEO in February of 2022.
As the amount, speed, and type of data increases across various applications, CIOs, CDOs, and CEOs find themselves stuck in between dealing with the two sometimes contrasting strategies. This problem is only further complicated as managing authority policies throughout several cloud systems was previously long and tiresome. A lot of businesses lack the technical resources needed to facilitate access controls across a huge number of login systems. We are thrilled to collaborate with the Databricks team and to implement our knowledge and experience to create a secure, robust, and user-friendly governance system for the world’s most innovative businesses. This governance system needs to be powered by AI.
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