Ed Lenta Joins from AWS to Lead Asia Pacific and Japan; Greg Taylor Brings Go To Market Cloud Expertise to Lead Australia and Southeast Asia
Databricks has appointed Ed Lenta as the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), based in Australia. He joins industry veteran, Greg Taylor, who brings deep go to market cloud expertise to his role as Regional Vice President of Australia and Southeast Asia.
Lenta brings nearly 20 years of enterprise technology and leadership experience to Databricks’ regional operations and is responsible for teams in more than 20 countries across APJ. In his role, Lenta will expand customer-facing teams and support organisations with data teams accelerating innovation and achieving AI success.
“Ed and Greg are joining during an exciting period of growth for Databricks in Australia and across the region. With the depth of leadership expertise, these appointments will allow us to continue providing customers with unique and innovative data-driven solutions and expand our exciting portfolio of start-ups, enterprise and government organisations,” says Bede Hackney, ANZ Country Manager.
Lenta joins Databricks from Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he led their business across APJ. Prior to this he helped build the AWS Australia and New Zealand and the Global Accounts businesses. In previous roles Lenta helped expand VMware from an early stage company to major platform provider, holding regional leadership roles in South East Asia and Australia and New Zealand.
Taylor joins Databricks after leading APJ for New Relic where his team grew the business at over 50% CAGR with both enterprise and digital-native customers across the region. Taylor has also held a number of leadership roles across ANZ and Asia with Marketo, BMC and Oracle. Taylor is a Non-Executive Director for WhiteSky Labs, an award winning Mulesoft partner which recently received an investment from Salesforce to accelerate the company’s growth across the Asian Markets.
“I am thrilled to be joining the regional leadership team at Databricks. In its short history, Databricks has helped organisations of every size, across every industry transform themselves through data and AI,” said Lenta. “But it’s still very early. While every company seems to understand the critical role that data and AI must play in accelerating innovation, staying competitive, and anticipating customers needs, very few have figured out how to do it successfully. I truly believe that Databricks has figured this out, and couldn’t be more excited to help make organisations in the APJ region successful.”
These executive appointments come as Databricks continues to develop its APJ business with the opening of offices in Sydney, Tokyo, Japan and Bangalore in June and the appointment of Bede Hackney as Databricks’ inaugural ANZ Country Manager in November. In Australia, Databricks’ customers include Healthdirect and Sportsbet.
Globally, Databricks has grown annual recurring revenue (ARR) well over 2.5x over the past year with a US$200 million revenue run rate, up from almost zero in less than four years. In October 2019, Databricks announced a US$400 million Series F round of funding resulting in a US$6.2 billion valuation.
