Next-gen data science: a conversation with the Ravit Show and Eric Pité
Eric Pité, SVP of Product & Strategy, sat down with the Ravit Show at Databricks Data + AI Summit to have a conversation about the evolution of open source data science, the Posit and Databricks integration, and the place of AI in modern data science. Some highlights from the conversation are below: -- The evolution from RStudio to Posit It’s more than just a name change — it’s a signal of how seriously they’re embracing Python while staying true to their R roots and open-source mission. -- Open source meets enterprise Eric shared how Posit is navigating the balance between community contribution and commercial sustainability — and why that mission still matters in an AI-first world. -- Positron + Databricks Their strategic partnership is one to watch. Positron is making it easier to do high-quality data science (in R and Python) inside the Databricks ecosystem, with an emphasis on collaboration, reproducibility, and performance. -- AI’s place in modern data science Eric and Ravit chatted about how Posit sees the role of AI in helping data teams be more productive, without losing rigor or transparency. -- The power of storytelling with code One of our favorite parts is the emphasis on communication. Building models is not enough—data scientists need to share insights clearly, and Posit is building for that. Learn more about the Databricks and Posit partnership by exploring the partnership page and resources: https://posit.co/use-cases/databricks/
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hi everyone, we're here at Data Plus AI Summit and look who I have with me, Eric, the SVP of Product and Strategy at Posit. Eric, welcome to the Ravit Show, such a pleasure to host you today. I'm excited to learn a little about what's happening at Posit, also a little about your role, and I know you all have a deeper partnership with Databricks as well, so wanting to learn a little about that. But why not, just for our audience, quickly tell us a little about yourself, what do you do at Posit, and also a little about Posit too, please.
Well, thank you, thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be with you today. My name is Eric Pité, I've been with the company for about five and a half years. I lead Product and Strategy, so product management, strategic integration partnership like Databricks, where we are today. And yeah, that's me in a nutshell.
From RStudio to Posit
I've seen Posit for a while now, but I also followed RStudio back then. So I'm kind of wanting to know a little bit about that story too, about Posit's rebrand from RStudio, and also a little bit if you can talk about the increased focus on Python.
Yeah, so the company was created under the name RStudio about 16 years ago by JJ Allaire, and he decided to give back to the community by building better tooling for the R ecosystem. After that, Joe Chang also built Shiny, and Hadley Wickham built many open source R packages over the years. And about seven, eight years ago, we realized that R is really important, but for data science, Python is equally important. So we started to make investments in a Python ecosystem.
And we realized that the name, the brand RStudio was working against us. The analogy we often take is if you have a friend who's vegan, you want to take your friend to a restaurant and it says a steakhouse. You're going to have a hard time to explain to your friend. So about three years ago almost now, we decided to rebrand from RStudio to Posit so that we are not tied to one language. We are building a company that we hope is going to be around for over 100 years. And so 100 years, there won't be R, there won't be Python, so being tied to a language name was a challenge. So that's why we rebranded.
We are building a company that we hope is going to be around for over 100 years. And so 100 years, there won't be R, there won't be Python, so being tied to a language name was a challenge.
Balancing open source and enterprise
Also talking a little bit about, you know, since you all started open source, how do you kind of keep that balance between open source and the enterprise? But at the same time, Posit balances between machine, community, and commercials. So that's a massive way to balance things and at the same time give back to the community as much as possible.
So the company was really founded initially to build great open source products. And we built what we call the virtual circle, which we create great open source products that get traction in the market. Those data scientists using it will then go into enterprise, want to use those tools, and we build enterprise-grade solution, leveraging this open source solution. We charge for that. And then the proceed that we get, we reinvest back in the open source. So that's kind of this virtual circle.
So we have, you know, between 1,700 and 1,800 customers. And each time I meet them, I say, you know, whether you know it or not, you actually contribute to open source. Because about 40% of our engineering is dedicated to open source that we give away. So the root of the company is really open source.
About five and a half years ago, six years ago, we moved the company from a C corporation to a public benefit corporation. So maybe some of your listeners don't know quite what a public benefit corporation is. So when you're a C corporation, you have one goal, maximization of shareholder value. So for public benefit corporation, there are multiple stakeholders. And we basically inscribe that in our charter. You know, customers, employees, the greater good that we specify in our charter. So we made that change about five and a half years ago.
Positron and the Databricks partnership
So I'll start with Databricks since we are hosted by Databricks here today. We integrate our products with them so that there is no headache for the end user. You know, they don't need to have, you know, specific access token to access. Everything is integrated inside Posit Workbench to make their life easy. So, you know, all the credential pass through.
And what we do, which is really important also, is like make sure that we leverage all the data governance that Databricks offers that is very strong. So if we build an interactive application, you know, you access it, I access it. We have different access within Databricks. We would see different things. So, you know, inheriting the governance that you have in Databricks, I think is really important for enterprise. We do it for Databricks. In all transparency, we do it for others as well. You know, Snowflake and other players.
Positron, you know, so we started as RStudio. The RStudio idea was the first product we built. And we've learned a lot over more than 10 years. And we had a lot of customers and users coming to us and say, could you do PyStudio? You know, basically RStudio for the Python language.
And so a few years ago, we decided to solve this problem, which is offer a multi-language ID specifically for data scientists. So we took a fork out of VS Code. Leveraging all the great ecosystem and all the extension you can get from VS Code. But really focusing on solving the problems that data scientists have. So all the good learnings over the last 10 plus years on the RStudio ID are now in Positron, which is available to date for download. And we'll go GA next month.
AI in data science
AI is all the buzz these days. Everywhere you go. The pace of improvement has been hard to believe for me. If anyone told me three years ago I'd be able to do what I'm able to do today, I probably wouldn't have believed it.
So we want to empower, you know, data scientists to do more. And we have a number of products integrated in Positron to be able to do that. From code assistant to doing exploratory data analysis. But we want to do it in a very responsible way. We realize that, you know, there's a lot of trust given into a data scientist. So our data scientists need to be able to see and prove what they're doing. We know that LLMs are prone to hallucination. So that's kind of our take, which is, you know, really empower the data scientists in a very responsible way. By showing them the code, letting them edit and inspect the code.
We realize that, you know, there's a lot of trust given into a data scientist. So our data scientists need to be able to see and prove what they're doing. We know that LLMs are prone to hallucination.
Communicating data-driven work
So, you know, if you look at the flow of a data scientist, you know, usually you want to answer a question or multiple questions. You access data, you write code. We're a code-first company. You write code to generate your insight. You're very happy with yourself, but then you need to share that with other stakeholders, right? You're not going to go with your laptop around the office to share that.
So we've built a number of products. Some of them are free and open source. Others are more for the enterprise. And so they're coupled. Posit Connect really allows the data scientist to publish a lot of artifacts.
And about three, four years ago, we built something called Quarto. So Quarto helps you do what we call literate programming, which I think was coined by probably Donald Knuth many years ago. Ten plus years ago, we did R Markdown, which allows you to have code and prose and all of that in the same document. So we revamped that to be, again, multilingual. You could do it with the R language. You could do it with Python. You could do it with Julia. You could do it with Observable, JS, if you want, and many other things.
And that's also a testimony to balancing for us, you know, open source versus enterprise solution. We believe that products like Quarto should be accessible and available to everybody. And that's why it's fully open source for us.
If folks want to stay updated with all the insights, all the announcements, everything that you all are producing, where can they do that? And also, if they want to follow you, where can they follow you?
LinkedIn is a good place, probably the best place for me. But more important for the company, you know, our website, we have newsletter. We have a strong presence on LinkedIn, Blue Sky. But I would invite everybody to follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to the newsletters.
So you all know where you can follow Posit and team and stay updated with all the insights. Eric, such a pleasure chatting with you. Likewise. We'll keep the conversation going. Great work that you all are doing in this space. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
