Bangalore, May 7 2023:  Databricks, the  San Francisco (US)-headquartered data and AI company, has announced that there is  strong data lakehouse adoption in India and plans on  adding roles such as technical specialists, sales and support engineers, and go-to-market resources, to its team of over 250 here.
The company also announced the launch of a new R&D hub in Bangalore later this year.
Databricks has pioneered the data lakehouse, which is an open and unified data management architecture that combines the flexibility, cost efficiency and scalability of data lakes with the data  management features of data warehouses, enabling business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) on all data.
The company’s latest  product innovations includes of Dolly 2.0, the world’s first open-source, instruction-following large language model (LLM), fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use.
Dolly 2.0 is a 12B parameter language model based on the EleutherAI pythia model family and fine-tuned exclusively on a new, high-quality human generated instruction following dataset, crowdsourced among Databricks employees. Databricks is open-sourcing the entirety of Dolly 2.0, including the training code, the dataset, and the model weights, all suitable for commercial use.
This means that any organization can create, own, and customize powerful LLMs that can talk to people, without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.
Databricks also announced the appointment of Anil Bhasin as the Country Manager for  India. A tech industry veteran, Bhasin brings more than 30 years of experience to the role and joined Databricks from UiPath where he served as the Managing Director and VP of the company’s India and South Asia business. Previously, Bhasin was the Regional Vice President for Palo Alto Networks.
Databricks customers in India include InMobi, Swiggy, Dream11, Meesho, Freshworks and CRED.