Marketing was already a top-five use case for Databricks customers, and today’s launch of its new Data Intelligence for Marketing platform formalizes the company’s efforts to unify marketing data in one place and make it easily accessible.
It’s the first time Databricks, which has a decade of experience in the cloud data space, has launched a product designed specifically for marketers, and it speaks to the importance of data and AI to modern marketing organizations.
Many marketing teams are held back by rigid systems and fragmented data. MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack Survey results confirm this. Challenges like data integration and data silos are top of mind for marketers. These data challenges force marketers to make tradeoffs between things like privacy and personalization, for example.
Dig deeper: Download the 2025 State of Your Stack Survey report (no registration required)
Databricks wants to own the data and AI part of the martech stack, and leave the marketing to the martech stack apps (all 15,000-plus of them). To that end, Databricks integrated with several popular martech applications, such as Adobe, Amperity, Braze, Census, Epsilon, Hightouch, Snowplow, Tealium, OneTrust and Uniphore, as well as integrators like Deloitte and Slalom.
While those tools focus on marketing tactics, Databricks provides affordable data storage, handles large volumes of data in real time and has a powerful AI/ML workbench.
In the martech solar system, Databricks envisions its Data Intelligence Platform as the sun, sitting squarely in the center. The martech apps orbit around it, being replaced if necessary and adding new applications and functionality as needed to serve the market. The data stays put in the center. But it hasn’t always been that way.
The battle over marketing data is over
As the number of martech platforms exploded in the past 15 years, IT and marketing often found themselves at odds over data. Martech platforms were storing it in various silos and different clouds.
Roles like the CTO, CIO and CDO were often uncomfortable with this arrangement. Their job is to de-risk, and scattered data is challenging to secure. Add in the steep penalties and mish-mosh of regulations from the E.U., various other nations and any number of U.S. states, and it’s a bonanza of data risk.
Putting data warehouses, data lakes and data lakehouses — whichever tool or nomenclature you prefer — at the center of the martech stack makes it easier for IT to protect data and for marketers to tap into a single data source.
Databricks hopes to get them all working together with its new platform.
“You’re a data scientist. You’re a data analyst. You’re a data engineer who is building the pipelines marketing uses in order to do things like segmentation and personalization and a whole bunch of really cool stuff,” said Bryan Saftler, Databricks’ director of industry and solutions marketing. “What’s interesting about what we’re launching now is the bringing together of these organizations, the IT department and the marketing department, in order to do the stuff data-driven marketers need to do.”
As for disagreements about how to store marketing data?
“What we’ve started to see more and more is that the IT department has kind of won,” Saftler told MarTech.
“We’re helping the IT departments realize that there’s an architecture that can achieve all of their major objectives: scalability, security, governance, compliance,” Saftler said, “and help the marketing organization also realize that there’s a single place to land all your data to achieve your marketing outcomes, your personalization at scale, bigger campaigns, big results, self-service insights for everyone, scale and impact through AI, automation, things like that.”
And that’s not surprising. The 2025 State of Martech Survey report released last week by Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma found that 31.3% of respondents considered a cloud data warehouse/lakehouse the center of the martech stack, topping marketing automation platforms (MAPs, 31.3%), customer engagement platforms (26%), and customer data platforms (CDPs, 14.6%).
While protecting data is hugely important, there’s another reason for marketing data to be safe and secure in one place: AI. For years, the popular saying in data analytics was “Garbage in, garbage out.” Today, an AI agent without human supervision might take out the garbage and deliver it straight to a customer.
That’s a nightmare both IT and marketing need to avoid.
Dig deeper: Martech Landscape 2025: Growing, shrinking and reshaping all at once
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