Databricks has announced new partnerships with Cloudflare, Dell, Oracle, and Twilio through its Delta Sharing feature, which allows live data to be shared securely with other computing platforms. 

For example, the Cloudflare connection allows sharing from Databricks to Cloudflare R2, which is Cloudflare’s distributed object storage offering, eliminating the need to manage complex data transfers or duplications and ensures that customers are always sharing the most updated data sets. 

“We are in the midst of an AI revolution rooted in data,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “Cloudflare R2 provides an amazing value proposition for companies that suffer from vendor lock-in, and instead ensures developers retain the power to choose where to move and use their data. The combination of Cloudflare’s massive global network and zero egress storage, along with Databricks’ powerful sharing and processing capabilities, will give our joint customers the fastest, most secure, and most affordable data sharing capabilities across the globe.”

Customers can share data, AI models, and notebooks directly with companies that support Delta Sharing without expensive fees or the need to replicate their data. Delta Sharing provides an easy way to manage permissions as well. 

According to Databricks, the lack of an open standard for sharing data has stunted the creation of a universal secure data exchange, and customers were required to replicate their data across multiple platforms, clouds, and regions if they wanted to sharte it. Delta Sharing allows data sharing with any company that supports the protocol.

“Without an open standard for secure data exchange across organizations, companies find it highly time-consuming to collaborate, requiring export, replication and maintenance of data across many software platforms,” said Matei Zaharia, co-founder and CTO at Databricks. “Delta Sharing provides the first open protocol for sharing data across diverse computing platforms, clouds and regions. Today’s announcements show just how much demand there is for this in the industry, with multiple major technology vendors joining the ecosystem. We are excited about how this will push open interchange forward and help all of our customers collaborate more easily.”