Through the new partner initiative dbt Labs looks to strengthen integration links with developers of data governance, data quality and data management tools and leading business analytics software vendors.
Data transformation and analytics engineering technology developer dbt Labs is launching a technology partner program today that the company says will strengthen business alliances and technical integrations between the startup and leading data management and business intelligence software vendors.
The new dbt Labs Technology Partner Program will have more than 50 partners at its debut today, company executives told CRN in an exclusive interview, including data integration technology developer Airbyte, data observability platform vendor Monte Carlo and data analytics leader ThoughtSpot.
The dbt Labs technology is designed for how Data transformation work is increasingly being done with the paradigm shift from on-premises to cloud computing, “which blows up all of the expectations around how one wants to interact with large datasets,” said CEO Tristan Handy in an interview with CRN.
Founded in 2016 and based in Philadelphia, dbt Labs has been gaining momentum with its cloud-based data transformation workflow tools that help businesses and organizations build data pipelines and transform, test and document data in cloud data warehouse systems.
The company’s platform includes a development framework that combines SQL development and software engineering best practices such as modularity, portability, CI/CD and documentation.
“Prior generations of tooling were built with a set of assumptions about how much compute they would have access to and how much storage they would have access to and how constrained they were,” Handy said. “And all on-prem. With services like [Google] BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks – those constraints go out the window. All of a sudden there‘s this opportunity to rethink how workloads and allocation permissions are done.”
In February dbt Labs raised $222 million in Series D funding, boosting its valuation to $4.2 billion. Currently there are 12,000 companies using the open source dbt Core software and 2,000 customers using its commercial dbt Cloud platform.
Today dbt Labs primarily partners with technology companies and ISVs – the focus of the new program – and consultants in the data management and business analytics space.
“At Airbyte, we have a great deal in common with dbt Labs – both of us are developing open-source software and fostering lively communities to enhance the lives of data practitioners,” said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO at Airbyte, in a statement. “We’re excited to work together to build great experiences for the strong and growing mutual user base.”
“The types of partners that we‘re working with is really a wide spectrum,” said Nikhil Kothari, head of technology alliances at dbt Labs, in the interview. “The reason why we’re investing in this program – and we‘ve been working with partners for a while now – is to really help enable a range of seamless integrations that are used by data practitioners that really extend these capabilities.
“We have over 50 or so partners today that are already engaged in the partner program and the categories that they provide solutions for range from data ingestion, data quality, data catalogs and data governance, all the way through the BI layer,” Kothari said.
dbt Labs sees itself as playing a central role in the cloud data analytics “stack.” In recent months a number of players in the big data space have established alliances with dbt Labs and/or linked their products with the dbt Labs platform and tools, including data lakehouse developer Databricks and cloud data analytics provider Starburst.
