The Data Cloud Alliance is a new player in town. The group’s mission is to “make data more portable and accessible across disparate business systems, platforms, and environments—with a goal of ensuring that access to data is never a barrier to digital transformation.” It was founded by Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst.
Snowflake registered a trademark for “Data Cloud Alliance” in 2020, but the registration has since been abandoned, and the company is no longer a member of the new alliance.
The goal is to make life easier for members’ customers by collaborating on APIs and integration solutions that will allow data portability and accessibility between their platforms, whether they are on-premises, in private or public clouds (or a mix of them).
According to Google’s announcement today, the members will collaborate to develop “new, common industry data models, processes, and platform interfaces to boost data portability and minimize the complexity associated with data governance and worldwide compliance.”
For example, Databricks claims it is looking forward to working with Google to “promote data exchange based on open standards like [Databrick’s] Delta Lake.”
It’s worth noting that the partners here aren’t all rivals, but rather offer complementary services. Many of these firms have already worked with Google, including Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis Labs, for example, integrating their services with the Google Cloud Platform.
“Data is the common underpinning for all digital transformations,” stated Gerrit Kazmaier, Google Cloud’s VP and General Manager for Databases, Data Analytics, and Business Intelligence.
“We believe that by committing to open data standards, access, and integration with today’s most popular data platforms and apps, we can considerably speed up business transformations and close the data to value gap.”
