BERKELEY, Calif. – March 18, 2014 – Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark that is revolutionizing what enterprises can do with Big Data, today announced the Databricks “Certified on Spark” Program for applications built on top of the Apache Spark platform. This program ensures that certified applications will work with a multitude of commercially supported Spark distributions.

“Pioneering application developers that are leveraging the power of Spark have had to choose between two sub-optimal choices: they either have to package Spark platform support with their application or attempt to maintain integration/certification individually with a rapidly increasing set of commercially supported Spark distributions,” said Ion Stoica, Databricks CEO. “The Databricks ‘Certified on Spark’ program enables developers to certify solely against the 100% open-source Apache Spark distribution, and ensures interoperability with Apache Spark-compatible distributions. Databricks will handle the task of certifying the compatibility of each commercial Spark distribution with the Apache version and will soon announce the initial set of distributions that meet this criteria.”