Riyadh - Sharikat Mubasher: Databricks, the data and artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in San Francisco, officially launched its operations and opened a new office in Saudi Arabia, establishing Riyadh as its regional hub for growth in the Middle East.

Databricks will forge strategic partnerships and invest in the Saudi market to enable its growing local customer base to combine data, analytics, and AI with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, the company announced in a press release.

The company further appointed Mohammad Alzaubi as General Manager to lead operations in the Kingdom. He brings a wealth of experience from IBM, SAP, and Microsoft to drive the adoption of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform across various industries, including financial services, telecommunications, energy, and retail.

Commenting on this milestone, Mohammed Alrobayan, Deputy Minister for Technology in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), affirmed that Databricks’ presence in Saudi Arabia will support the Kingdom’s ambitions to build a powerful ecosystem of cloud providers and software companies that help businesses and government partners achieve a new level of technical excellence and innovation.

Andy Kofoid, President and Head of Worldwide Operations at Databricks, said: “The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform has the power to support the most innovative companies and entrepreneurs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to derive greater insights from their enterprise data and build generative AI solutions much faster.”

Moreover, Databricks will run a data engineer training and certification program with MCIT to drive the adoption of the Data Intelligence Platform amongst its customers in the Kingdom.

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform serves more than 10,000 organizations worldwide, enabling them to control their data and put it to work with AI.