Dipankar Kushari

Enterprises managing data and AI assets across multiple tools and platforms often face fragmented governance, redundant data copies, and operational overhead. This session shows how Unity Catalog serves as a single governance layer for the open lakehouse by allowing every engine to access to the same data, with the same policies, without sacrificing performance or security. Through deep-dives, live demos, and an enterprise use case from General Motors, you'll see how organizations are using UC Open APIs to break down data silos and enforce consistent governance across their data estate. Whether you're evaluating multi-engine architectures or scaling governance across a large organization, you'll leave with practical learnings you can apply right away.

Databricks Unity Catalog (UC) is the industry’s only unified and open governance solution for data and AI, built into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. UC provides a single source of truth for organization’s data and AI, providing open connectivity to any data source, any format, lineage, monitoring and support for open sharing and collaboration. In this session we will discuss the challenges in upgrading to UC from your existing databricks Non-UC set up. We will discuss a few customer use cases and how we overcame difficulties and created a repeatable pattern and reusable assets to replicate the success of upgrading to UC across some of the largest databricks customers. It is co-presented with our partner Celebal Technologies.

PepsiCo, given its scale, has numerous teams leveraging different tools and engines to access data and perform analytics and AI. To streamline governance across this diverse ecosystem, PepsiCo unifies its data and AI assets under an open and enterprise-grade governance framework with Unity Catalog. In this session, we'll explore real-world examples of how PepsiCo extends Unity Catalog’s governance to all its data and AI assets, enabling secure collaboration even for teams outside Databricks. Learn how PepsiCo architects permissions using service principals and service accounts to authenticate with Unity Catalog, building a multi-engine architecture with seamless and open governance. Attendees will gain practical insights into designing a scalable, flexible data platform that unifies governance across all teams while embracing openness and interoperability.