ClickHouse just got a lot more serious about the channel, and the reason is pretty straightforward - customers are dealing with heavier data workloads, more real-time analytics needs, and a lot of AI experimentation that is now moving into production. This is putting real pressure on the data layer, and the data layer has to keep up. It also creates a bigger opening for partners who can help customers connect tools, modernize older platforms, tune performance, and build architectures that can support AI at scale.And ClickHouse is building a program to work with them more intentionally. It's called House Mates. House Mates is ClickHouse's first formal partner community and program. Launched with more than 60 ISV, services, consulting, and reseller partners, the company is now giving partners more structure around enablement, certifications, co-selling, incentives, and integration work. For customers, it creates a clearer path to find validated integrations, regional expertise, and preferred buying options.For ClickHouse, a database company focused on real-time analytics, it is also about positioning ahead of a demand shift. In this conversation, Abhinav Mehla, vice president of global partners and business development at ClickHouse, explains why ClickHouse launched House Mates now, what partners are actually asking for, how AI is reshaping customer requirements, and where resellers, systems integrators, services partners, ISVs, and MSPs fit into the company's next phase.
ChannelE2E: ClickHouse has said ARR more than tripled year over year, and the customer base grew to more than 4,000 by late May. What is driving that acceleration right now? Is it AI workloads, cloud migration, cost pressure, or something else?Abhinav Mehla: ClickHouse has three main use cases. One is data warehousing, similar to what Snowflake and Databricks have been doing. The second is real-time analytics, and that is where we shine. In an AI world, you want an agent to get a response at millisecond latency. That is one reason why leading companies such as Sierra, Anthropic, and OpenAI use ClickHouse as their underlying platform.The third use case is observability, which is related to real-time analytics. Observability is about logs, traces, metrics, and similar data.
AI is definitely a very big tailwind for us. Earlier, people used tools like Datadog, and there was no concept of agents working on that data. Now, customers want observability data that agents can act on instead of humans. To build those capabilities and to make sure agents can take corrective action within seconds, you need a fast, performant database. That is where ClickHouse comes in. We provide strong performance at lower cost, and that is why we are relevant to AI workloads.ChannelE2E: How has customer demand changed as enterprises move from experimenting with LLMs to putting them into production?Abhinav Mehla: The customer mix has changed. Four years ago, ClickHouse was mostly used by tech-forward companies that knew the open-source project and understood the database.Now, we are seeing more traction among enterprises. That is mainly because enterprises are moving deeper into AI. They were first playing with LLMs, then training those LLMs. Now they are putting LLMs to work, and that is where ClickHouse comes in.We are seeing more enterprise adoption because of that. The customer mix is definitely changing.ChannelE2E: House Mates is ClickHouse’s first formal partner program. What need did you see in the market, and what does the program include?Abhinav Mehla: The program is built around technology partnerships, systems integrators, and reseller partners.When I came in, ClickHouse already had a lot of adoption, but customers were struggling from an integration perspective. There were about 200 integrations available, and many were built by the open-source community. Customers were asking: Can I trust these integrations? When were they last updated? Who supports them?We did not have a way to handle that.At the same time, companies were asking to partner with us and deepen their integrations. Customers were also asking which integration they should use when there were multiple options.So we needed to put structure around how we build, support, and validate integrations. We now have an integrations team with product managers and engineers working on this. We needed a way to prioritize integrations, support them, and strengthen them.The same applies on the systems integrator (SI) side. We do not have an internal professional services team. Customers were asking where they should go for implementation help, performance tuning, and training. Some unofficial partners were already stepping in, while other customers were finding their own SIs.We needed to build the partner ecosystem and train partners on ClickHouse. Training was the first phase. We started training SI contacts about six months earlier. Now we are giving them recipes, playbooks, and troubleshooting guides used by our support and consultative services teams.We are also building AI frameworks for modernization. For example, if someone wants to move from Google BigQuery to ClickHouse, we want SIs to build accelerators around that. Instead of giving them a generic slide-based process, we want to be opinionated about how they should use agents to modernize in an AI world. We have trained more than 100 SI contacts so far. It is working well because, as the customer mix changes, these customers are asking for more help. Now we have an answer that we did not have six months ago.ChannelE2E:A lot of data platforms already have partners and integrations. What makes ClickHouse’s approach different?Abhinav Mehla: Compared with providers such as Databricks and Snowflake, which are more proprietary, ClickHouse comes from open source. ClickHouse has been open source for about 10 years, and for six of those years, there was no company around it. Because of that, people built a lot of integrations in the wild.That creates a problem. We need to guide customers so they do not use unsupported integrations. Our goal is to give them integrations they can take into production without worrying about support.For a company of our size, a little north of 550 people, having a dedicated team of product managers and engineers working on integrations is significant. The team is more than 20 people.When customers put agentic applications or real-time applications into production, they need integrations with the rest of the stack. Over the past few years, there has been a lot of growth in tools around data governance, data pipelines, and related areas. There is a lot of sprawl. Every customer is trying to use the tools they like, and we want to make their lives easier.ChannelE2E: You have talked about being selective with partners rather than building a very large program. What does a good ClickHouse partner look like?Abhinav Mehla: On the SI side, we want partners that are not just body shops. They need to have a strong technical bench. The quality of their resources matters.That is why some of the names you see may not be as widely known as TCS or Accenture. We do work with GSIs, but the current focus is on SWAT teams that can go into a customer project, deliver the work, and then move on. They need to be highly trained.On the technology partner side, we are selective about who we work with and build integrations with. That is based on signals from the open-source community and from customers.We are putting more effort into integrations where we see strong demand and real customer value. In other cases, we may ask partners to build the integration because we are not seeing the same level of traction.ChannelE2E:How can partners turn ClickHouse technical enablement into repeatable services or revenue opportunities?Abhinav Mehla: For SI partners, we are sharing specific labs, AI-based migration frameworks, and migration tooling. The goal is that partners are not just technically familiar with ClickHouse. We want them to be highly skilled in delivering projects. The eventual goal is for each SI partner to have a ClickHouse center of excellence, focused on delivering the right projects with the right optimization.A lot of companies launch partner programs that are mostly directories or badge programs. House Mates is meant to be more than a discovery tool. It is a go-to-market engine.The first part is integration quality. The second is real co-selling and co-marketing support. We are providing incentives to partners, similar to how AWS, Azure and Google work with partners. If partners bring us opportunities, they get rewarded.We also want to do more co-marketing with partners. Last week, we had a conference where 14 companies were sponsored, and the second day was dedicated to partners.The third part is tiering. Partners start at Ignite, then graduate to Accelerate and Prime. There is a clear growth path, with clear benefits and criteria. Partners know that when they make resource commitments, they are getting something back.That predictability matters. It is not just a badge where a few people get certified, and then they call themselves a ClickHouse partner.ChannelE2E: Where do MSPs fit in the House Mates strategy? Are you looking at them mainly as resellers and implementation partners, or do you see them building managed analytics, observability and AI data services on top of ClickHouse?Abhinav Mehla: Some of the SIs we are working with, especially in the Middle East and APJ, are actually MSPs. Examples include Cloud Days and Megazone Cloud. If they have the right skills, we will lean on MSPs as well.We are seeing more of this in the Middle East and APJ because we do not have professional services, and we also do not always have technical teams on the ground. These partners can extend us from a sales and pre-sales perspective.Given language differences in those regions, they are also in a better position to provide pre-sales and managed services. We will likely see even more of this as we strengthen our self-managed and bring-your-own-cloud offerings.ChannelE2E: ClickHouse is expanding from ClickHouse Cloud into managed Postgres, ClickStack, Langfuse and ClickHouse Agents. How do you keep the company focused as the portfolio grows? Could broader capabilities create more complexity for partners?Abhinav Mehla: I think it is okay for a company like ours, especially because we are challenging large incumbents in the market. Innovation matters, and part of that innovation comes from acquisitions. Over the past few years, we have made a number of acquisitions, but none of them have been just for the sake of adding capabilities. They are based on what we are seeing in the market, what customers are asking us for, and what customers are already using with ClickHouse.Langfuse is a good example. People are already using ClickHouse for observability. We acquired Langfuse in January. It is a leading open-source tool for AI observability. That complements our infrastructure observability story with AI observability because people are already using ClickHouse observability for their AI applications. So it is a natural fit. None of these acquisitions have been random.ChannelE2E: What is next for ClickHouse partners?Abhinav Mehla: There is another partnership area where we want to invest: ISVs that are building on ClickHouse. Sierra is a customer, and they have built on ClickHouse. We want to help partners like that from a go-to-market perspective. When they are selling Sierra, ClickHouse is embedded in it. In that sense, they are also selling ClickHouse. The more we help them, the better it is for us as well. It is mutually beneficial. That is where we will focus over the next couple of quarters.
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