No-code ingestion connectors for Salesforce, Workday to help enterprise customers unlock full power of Data Intelligence
● The first connectors of many, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Workday provide a simple and scalable method to ingest data into Databricks.
● Lakeflow Connect enables use cases such as analysing consumer behavior, predicting churn, and centralising HR analytics.
● Global enterprise customers like Porsche Holding are already using Lakeflow Connect to strengthen their consumer journeys.
Sydney, Australia, April 3 – Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the General Availability of Lakeflow Connect for Salesforce and Workday. Lakeflow Connect introduces no-code ingestion connectors for popular SaaS applications, databases, and file sources – enabling enterprises to build scalable ingestion pipelines and unlock the full power of their data with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. The Salesforce and Workday connectors are the first managed connectors to be released to GA since the Lakeflow Connect announcement last July, with many more on the way.
Lakeflow Connect enables high-value use cases across industries, such as understanding customer behaviour, analysing HR data, and identifying upsell opportunities. It is powered by serverless compute and is available across AWS, Azure and GCP. Its managed data connectors are fully integrated with the Data Intelligence Platform for governance, observability and enterprise security.
“It’s challenging for ANZ businesses to build and maintain ingestion pipelines for SaaS applications themselves because each API is unique and changes often, and database ingestion can be even more complex. Enterprises often require additional infrastructure like virtual machines for extraction tools, Kafka for streaming, and a strong understanding of change data capture (CDC) technologies for efficient ingestion,” said Nick Eayrs, Vice President of Field Engineering, APJ, at Databricks.
“This means organisations spend a lot of time building, optimising, and maintaining a patchwork of pipelines. This slows down projects and can create a fragmented ETL architecture that’s difficult to govern. It also forces highly skilled data engineers to spend time moving data and monitoring pipelines instead of developing strategic innovations.”
Lakeflow Connect eliminates these challenges by making it easy to create production-ready pipelines with a few clicks in the UI or a few lines of code. Under the hood, ingestion is efficient, with incremental updates and optimised API usage. As your managed pipelines run, we take care of schema evolution, seamless third-party API upgrades, and comprehensive observability with built-in alerts.
Lakeflow Connect for Salesforce allows enterprises to pair Databricks’ advanced analytics and AI tools with Salesforce’s CRM data to build a more effective seller experience: predicting sales trends, deepening insights into customer behaviors, and personalising engagement strategies. The connector supports Salesforce-specific requirements, like custom objects and formula fields.
Databricks and Salesforce announced a strategic partnership in 2023 to build robust integrations for our joint customers, and have since then launched the zero-copy Salesforce Data Cloud Connector so customers can discover, query, and govern Salesforce Data Cloud directly from Unity Catalog. Paired with Lakeflow Connect for Salesforce, customers can use both their CRM data and their CDP data within Databricks.
Lakeflow Connect for Workday also provides simple, low-maintenance ingestion. Enterprises can access custom Workday reports for centralised analytics on their employee workforce.
Both connectors seamlessly integrate with the Data Intelligence Platform, so businesses can use:
● DLT to transform data declaratively and update transformations incrementally as data continues to stream in
● Databricks Workflows to orchestrate these pipelines
● Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs) to manage continuous integration and delivery
● Advanced analytics and machine learning tools to drive business value
● Unity Catalog to govern data and pipelines
● Lakehouse Monitoring to maintain data quality
Driving high-value business use cases
Lakeflow Connect helps unlock high-value use cases across various industries, such as understanding customer behavior, analysing HR data, or identifying upsell opportunities.
A common use case is predicting customer churn, such as a retailer ingesting Salesforce customer order data and combining it with customer interactions across other channels for enriched insights.
Another use case is creating a customer support dashboard for executives and support teams. You can even use LLMs to diagnose the trends that appear in the dashboard, as shown in this step-by-step blog post.
For human resources departments, the Workday connector can help track and predict HR trends, such as employee turnover. For example, HR leaders can ingest relevant Workday reports, transform them with DLT, and incorporate the results into an AI/BI dashboard.
Use case: Developing a human resources dashboard with Lakeflow Connect for Workday
“Using the Salesforce connector from Lakeflow Connect helps us close a critical gap for Porsche from the business side on ease of use and price. On the customer side, we’re able to create a completely new customer experience that strengthens the bond between Porsche and the customer with a unified and unfragmented customer journey,” said Lucas Sulzberger, Project Manager, Porsche Holding
Getting started with Lakeflow Connect
Data teams can now use Lakeflow Connect to build efficient, incremental pipelines at scale, with just a few clicks or lines of code. Get started today with the Salesforce or Workday connector to help unlock high-value use cases, such as predicting customer churn, running personalised customer analytics, and identifying upsell opportunities.
Lakeflow Connect’s roadmap includes additional connectors like SQL Server, Google Analytics, ServiceNow, SFTP, SharePoint, and PostgreSQL.
Lakeflow Connect has a compute-based pricing model. Salesforce and Workday, which run exclusively on serverless infrastructure will incur serverless DLT DBT charges. See more details on rates: https://www.databricks.com/product/pricing/delta-live
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 10,000 organisations worldwide — including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to take control of their data and put it to work with AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark , Delta Lake and MLflow.