This article was originally written by Avanade alumn Luke Pritchard.

When Microsoft Azure became generally available in 2010, few realized it would become the most credible enterprise cloud platform worldwide. As the Azure community and partner ecosystem celebrates its 10th birthday, Accenture and Avanade have built and refined an unmatched set of processes and best practices around the delivery of Azure Cloud Native solutions. 

Much of our recent efforts have focused on optimizing the use of Azure Databricks for data engineering and data science in enterprises. We have invested heavily in end-to-end integration to all Azure Cloud native services that compliment Azure Databricks investments.  Our work has benefited clients in their ability to scale artificial intelligence (AI) and drive increased business value throughout the enterprise.

Avanade recognized as global Partner of the Year
Through our work together with Databricks and clients worldwide, I am proud that Avanade has been named the Databricks Global Consulting and System Integrator Partner of the Year. Voted by Databricks leadership, Avanade has been recognized out of over 400 companies in the Databricks partner ecosystem.

Databricks, a leader in data and AI, acknowledged Avanade during the Databricks Partner Executive Summit in June 2020.  The recognition acknowledges Avanade’s customer impact at a global scale and is based on several categories including executive leadership, commitment in training, marketing, solutions and strong alignment with Databricks’ account teams.  

Early on we saw the potential of Azure Databricks.  Our relationship with Databricks began in 2018 and over the years we have helped identify new use cases for leading customers across industries and worldwide. Now Avanade and Databricks have more joint engagements than any other partner and announced a strategic global partnership earlier this year. 

Through our partnership, Avanade becomes Databricks’ key global partner and will benefit from its deep knowledge and experience in massive scale data engineering, and collaborative data science, complementing Avanade’s Azure data and AI capabilities. In turn, Databricks gains access to Avanade’s market leading client solutions, capabilities, and integration know-how on the Azure and Azure Databricks platform. 

Intense focus on industry specific solutions moving forward
With Databricks, we have taken the investments and strengths of both companies to target industry solutions with an intense focus on financial services. To date we have jointly invested in Financial Services Customer Personalization, and Hadoop Migration to accelerate business results.  Most recently we are co-investing with Databricks on a Risk Asset for the financial services industry intended to assist clients with predicting the risk involved in investing in specific market opportunities.

We are also bringing innovative solutions illustrated by the voice of our clients across industries like retail and banking. For example, in manufacturing, thyssenkrupp Material Services, continues to be an innovation leader where their solution helps optimize logistics with insights into transportation costs and inventory levels.

Fully exploit the power of Azure and Azure Databricks
Of course, we are excited to be recognized for our Azure Databricks’ commitment and we’re even more excited to continue to impact client success. As the most experienced Microsoft Azure cloud services partner, with more Microsoft Certified Professionals on Azure than any other Microsoft partner, I am confident we will continue to help clients fully exploit the power of Azure and Azure Databricks.   

Find out more about how to power your data science teams and scale data and AI with Avanade and Azure Databricks.