San Francisco-based big data and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions firm Databricks has appointed former Salesforce exec Andy Kofoid as President of Global Field Operations. He takes up the position on September 7.

Founded by the team who created big data processing engine Apache Spark, and built on a lakehouse architecture in the cloud, Databricks offers a unified online platform for data engineering, machine learning, and analytics workloads. Yesterday, the firm announced it had raised $1.6 billion in a Series H round of funding, valuing the firm at $38 billion.

Kofoid (pictured) joins with more than three decades of experience building, scaling and transforming software businesses. He spent the past eight years at Salesforce, where he latterly served as President, North America. He began his career at IBM, before moving to Oracle, and then held senior positions at TenFold, Alventive, MatrixOne, Dassault Systemes, and then ExactTarget, where he latterly served as Chief Operating Officer.

In his new role, Kofoid is tasked with helping rapidly scale go-to-market (GTM) functions, enter new markets and grow its partner ecosystem. CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi comments: 'Andy's background leading and scaling high growth, customer-focused GTM organizations and his commitment to operational excellence will take Databricks to new heights. As we work to create the lakehouse category and accelerate adoption of the data architecture of the future, Andy's experience in category creation and building a platform ecosystem will prove invaluable.'

Web site: www.databricks.com .

• Printer-friendly version of this article.
• Email this article to a friend.