This was my guess as well. I am wondering what you see as the "prospect of irrelevance" they are facing. I have my guess but I would like to hear your take.
People are doing more and more self-hosting and desire PaaS-like offerings that run in their own cloud, rather than SaaS “we manage your spark cluster for you” which is what DataBricks was founded upon. PaaS has significantly thinner margins, but it’s desirable from the customers’ perspective as it’s cheaper and much better from a (data) security point of view.
As such, they’ll be forced to do a lot more services oriented work rather than product / platform oriented work, because it pays well. Their sales team is also excellent. I see a similar fate for them as Cloudera.
You can find an article on Bloomberg stating that Databricks’ annual revenue has grown by 60%, which sort of backs the SaaS hypothesis it bets on. Do you have data on your PaaS hypothesis that is bigger than that?
