- Welcome to Data and AI Summit Europe.
I'm Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks.
Thank you for joining us.
We have a virtual format this year,
over 20,000 people from 149 countries are joining us.
Data and AI Summit Europe is a truly global community event.
If you joined us in prior years, you might've noticed
that we actually changed the name of the conference.
We changed it from Spark and AI Summit Europe,
to Data and AI Summit Europe.
And the reason is,
we want this to always be the premier event
for the whole data community
and everything that they do
and what the industry is doing.
And today, Spark has become the standard
for large-scale processing
and has rapidly accelerated the whole industry.
New open-source technologies have flourished,
thanks to Apache Spark.
We have things like Delta Lake, MLflow, Redash,
lots of new exciting use cases
and broader community adoption.
The new conference name and the content,
reflects these shifts.
As you'll see,
we will continue to have dedicated focus on Apache Spark.
There'll be lots of training material, content, speakers
that focus on Apache Spark
but we've added a lot more also
to cover the full technical spectrum,
going all the way from data to AI.
Also, we have a great lineup of speakers
over the next couple of days.
The range of guest speakers
goes across from industry leaders,
to thought leaders in academia.
Also as special guests keynotes,
to close each of the general sessions,
we have two that I'm really excited about.
We have Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author.
He will talk about how we would have handled
the whole COVID-19 crisis differently,
if it had been up to the data community
and he'll join us at the end of today's session.
And I'm also really excited to hear Dr. Mae Jemison,
first woman of color ever to travel to space.
We'll talk about her passion, about space exploration
and how it relates to what we're all doing with data.
Beyond the summit keynotes,
we also have a lot more to offer at the Data and AI Summit.
Be sure to check out everything else
like the Dev Hub Expo, the Birds of Feather sessions.
You can find all of this in your left nav,
on your virtual summit dashboard.
Also, I'd like to take a minute and thank the partners
that are helping us put this event on.
We wouldn't be able to pull this off without them.
Please join me in thanking them,
and make sure to pay them a visit in the Dev Hub,
and in the expo.
They have a lot of great material there.
With that, I wanna spend some time
talking about why this event is so important to us
and why it's so important right now.
At Databricks, our mission has always been
to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.
We share this mission with all of you,
the entire data community.
Nobody understands the power of data
and the potential of data and AI like this group.
This event is a great opportunity for us
to learn from each other, share new ideas
and move the whole industry forward.
This mission that we're on together
has never felt more urgent than it does today.
There's no shortage of tough problems around us,
COVID-19, healthcare challenges, climate challenge,
social and economic issues,
but I'm really inspired by the critical role
that the global data community can,
and I believe will play in solving challenges like these.
More than ever before, this is our time.
It is our time to unlock the full potential of data and AI
when the world needs us the most.
If there's one thing that we've learned at Databricks
as we watch our customers,
is that we can't do it alone.
Data and AI is truly a team sport.
Data engineers, data scientists and data analysts
all need to be able to work together.
They need a common playing field
onto which to collaborate and build.
And this is hard to do.
As legacy architectures have kept data teams
from operating like teams.
In order to succeed,
data teams must evolve from being separated by data,
to being unified by data.
And that's why our conference theme
this year is data teams unite.
It's a call to unite around the data,
unite to do your best work and help others do theirs,
unite to innovate faster,
unite to solve the world's toughest problems.
And this is what open source and the data community,
and this event has always been about.
It all started with Apache Spark,
it's now over a decade old.
It's in incredible growth and adoption,
and it's now the standard for large scale data processing.
And we think it's a fitting place
for us to start with today's talks.