Databricks on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a jointly developed service that integrates the Databricks open analytics platform with Google Cloud’s computing, storage, and analytics capabilities. This integration provides a unified experience for managing data engineering, data science, and analytics workloads.

Key features and benefits of Databricks on GCP include:

1. Unified Analytics Platform: Databricks on GCP is designed for building, deploying, sharing, and maintaining enterprise-grade data, analytics, and AI solutions at scale. It offers a range of tools for data processing, creating dashboards, machine learning modeling, and generative AI solutions.

2. Open Lakehouse Architecture: Databricks combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes to provide a simple, open lakehouse platform, enabling seamless integration with Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and the Google Cloud AI Platform.

3. Optimized for Kubernetes: It is built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), marking the first fully container-based Databricks runtime on any cloud. This setup leverages GKE’s managed services for portability, security, and scalability.

4. Analytics and Big Data Processing: The platform includes an optimized connector with Google BigQuery and supports additional tools like Looker for SQL Analytics and visualizations. It also integrates with Google Cloud’s data and AI services for scalable data processing and analytics.

5. Security and Administration: Databricks on GCP allows simplified deployment from the Google Cloud Marketplace, featuring unified billing, single sign-on, and integrated security and management.

6. Use Cases: Databricks on GCP is leveraged in various industries such as retail, telecom, media, entertainment, and financial services for use cases like data lake modernization, scalable data processing, reliable analytics on data lakes, and machine learning.

7. Partner Ecosystem: It is supported by a broad ecosystem of partners, including BI partners like Tableau and Qlik, ingest partners like Fivetran, and consulting partners like Accenture and Deloitte.

A practical example of its application is seen in Reckitt’s use of Databricks on Google Cloud for their customer analytics platform, which involved unifying media data from various sources and building a data platform to support key use cases like measuring marketing ROI.

For detailed information, you can refer to the official Databricks website and their blog posts about the launch and general availability of Databricks on Google Cloud​​​​​​​​.