Venerable big-data analytics company Databricks Inc. is betting on the ability of low-code software to inspire more citizen data scientists.

Databricks announced today it’s acquiring the Germany-based startup 8080 Labs GmbH, maker of a popular user interface-based data science tool called bamboolib that helps people without coding skills explore and transform data quickly and easily. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Databricks said it’s planning to integrate bamboolib into its Lakehouse Platform to deliver its first low-code capabilities and hopefully foster a new generation of so-called citizen data scientists.

Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform is an open data architecture that combines the flexibility and scale of data lakes with the superior data management and transactional abilities of data warehouses. It enables companies to collect all of their business data in one place, analyze it for business insights or leverage it for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

8080 Labs’ bamboolib is a data exploration tool that integrates with the Python programming language, generating production-ready code behind the scenes that can be used to ask questions of data and take action on it. With bamboolib, people without any coding skills can quickly obtain insights and create reports from data – something that previously only trained data scientists could do, according to 8080 Labs.

Databrics said the plan is to integrate bamboolib with the AutoML, visualization and dashboard features of the Lakehouse Platform. The integration with Auto ML especially looks very promising, since it will allow people with only a very basic understanding of data science to train machine learning models on their company’s datasets.

The company says citizen data scientists can play a key role in helping organizations to accelerate machine learning. The new capabilities will enable them to build “meaningful models” that can have an immediate impact across all areas of a business in a very short space of time, without waiting for an expert to come along and write those algorithms first.

The integration with bamboolib will also make it possible for people to perform comprehensive tasks ranging from data analysis to data transformation with relative ease, the company said. Whereas most existing tools for citizen data scientists are only exploratory in nature, bamboolib’s capabilities will make it possible for anyone to put their key findings to work without the need to request help from expert engineers.

Databricks co-founder and Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi said today’s acquisition is all about making advanced data capabilities more accessible.

“Together with last year’s acquisition of Redash, we are broadening the focus of our user base to a wider audience that prefers low-code/no-code solutions,” he said. “Bringing simple capabilities to Databricks is a critical step in empowering more people within an organization to easily analyze and explore large sets of data, regardless of expertise.”

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that the low-code data exploration capabilities won’t just help regular workers, but also skilled data scientists, since it will enable them to do many of their jobs much faster. “They’re only too happy for any help they can get that enables them to do more data science with less plumbing and other tasks,” he said.

Today’s acquisition follows a massive $1.6 billion Series H funding round by Databricks in August that pegs its value at a stunning $38 billion.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE