Tag: Databricks

Singapore – Businesses are increasingly integrating customer data platforms with AI and analytics to personalise customer experiences and drive business success, according to a new report from customer engagement platform Twilio.

Data from the report suggests that amidst the widespread adoption of AI, businesses are grappling with an exponential increase in data volume, with Twilio Segment processing a record high of 12.1 trillion API calls in 2023.

This increase is indicative of a larger trend towards more sophisticated, data-centric operations, emphasising the essential role of real-time data processing and seamless AI technology integration.

With this in mind, Twilio emphasises that the ability to quickly harness data insights through CDPs that are open and interoperable with data warehouses is a critical competitive edge, enabling businesses to efficiently collect, unify, and activate data across various platforms.

Going into detail, other key findings of the report claim that data integrity is essential for deriving meaningful customer insights and leveraging AI competitively, as the effectiveness of AI hinges on the data it’s trained on. 

Additionally, data warehouses continued to spike in popularity as one of the most popular destination categories for customer data in 2023, as businesses pave the way for deeper analytics and AI-driven insights.

Talking about these findings, Kathryn Murphy, SVP of product and design at Twilio, said, “In 2024, more and more brands will turn to AI to deliver better, more personalised experiences for their customers. Our report showcases the essential role customer data plays in maximising AI’s effectiveness.”

“At Twilio, we’re seeing a significant trend towards leveraging the interconnectedness of AI, data warehouses, and digital communication channels. The ability to interoperate with data warehouses is essential, ensuring that CDPs act as a pivotal technology for brands eager to leverage AI and data to forge even stronger relationships with their customers,” she added. 

Meanwhile, Chris Hecht, SVP, corporate development and product partnerships, at Databricks, commented, “As businesses look to break down data silos and rely on a unified data platform to power their analytics and AI initiatives, the importance of data sharing and data quality has never been more apparent.”

“Our collaboration with Twilio Segment signals our dedication to ensuring that organisations leverage the full potential of their data – no matter where it lives – and can effectively bridge the gap from data to insights using cleaned and verified event profile data”, he added.

Singapore – Data and AI company Databricks announced that it has agreed to acquire Arcion, a Databricks Ventures portfolio company that helps enterprises quickly and reliably replicate data across on-prem, cloud databases and data platforms. 

This acquisition of Arcion will enable Databricks to provide native solutions to ingest data from various databases and SaaS applications into the Databricks Lakehouse platform, with a transaction valued at over $100 million, inclusive of incentives.

In turn, the acquisition will enable Databricks to natively provide a scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective solution to ingest data from various enterprise data sources. Building on a scalable change data capture (CDC) engine, Arcion offers connectors for over 20 enterprise databases and data warehouses. 

Furthermore, the integration will simplify ingesting such data either continuously or on-demand into the lakehouse, fully integrated with the enterprise security, governance, and compliance capabilities of the platform.

Talking about the agreement, Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks, said, “Arcion’s highly reliable and easy-to-use solution will enable our customers to make that data available almost instantly for faster and more informed decision-making. Arcion will be a great asset to Databricks, and we are excited to welcome the team and work with them to further develop solutions to help our customers accelerate their data and AI journeys.”

Meanwhile, Gary Hagmueller, CEO of Arcion, commented, ”Arcion’s real-time, large-scale CDC data pipeline technology extends Databricks’ market-leading ETL solution to include replication of operational data in real-time. Databricks has been a great partner and investor in Arcion, and we are very excited to join forces to help companies simplify and accelerate their data and AI business momentum.”

Singapore – Lakehouse company Databricks has announced the release of Dolly 2.0, the world’s first open-source, instruction-following large language model (LLM) that is fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for commercial use.

This follows the initial release of Dolly in March 2023, an LLM trained for less than USD$30 to exhibit ChatGPT-like human interactivity.

The 12B parameter language model is based on the EleutherAI Pythia model family and fine-tuned exclusively on a high-quality human-generated instruction-following dataset, which was crowdsourced among Databricks employees.

Moreover, Databricks is also open-sourcing the entirety of Dolly 2.0, including the training code, the dataset, and the model weights, all suitable for commercial use. This enables any organisation to create, own, and customise powerful LLMs that can talk to people without paying for API access or sharing data with third parties.

Meanwhile, its databricks-dolly-15k dataset contains 15,000 high-quality human-generated prompt or response pairs specifically designed for instruction tuning large language models. With this, anyone can use, modify, or extend this dataset for any purpose, including commercial applications.

“Dolly 2.0 is a game changer as it enables all organisations around the world to build their own bespoke models for their particular use cases to automate things and make processes much more productive in the field they’re in,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks.

Ghodsi also added that with Dolly 2.0, any organisation can create, own, and customise a powerful LLM to create a competitive advantage for their business.

Last year, Databricks has also launched the first lakehouse platform for data-driven businesses in the media and entertainment industry, ‘The Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment’.

Singapore — Databricks, the data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse paradigm, has announced the appointment of Trâm Phi as senior vice president and general counsel.

In this role, Phi will pull from her decades of experience scaling high-growth companies, both public and private, to lead and grow the legal function at Databricks. She will join the company’s executive leadership team.

Phi joins Databricks from DocuSign, where she most recently served as SVP, and general counsel helping to scale the legal function and leading the transition of DocuSign to a mature public company. Prior to DocuSign, Phi was the chief legal officer and chief of staff at Imperva for nearly eight years and was the VP and general counsel of ArcSight, leading each of the cyber security software providers’ legal teams as they navigated the transition from private to public markets. She has led an impressive range of strategic transactions in these prior roles.

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, said, “Phi’s depth of experience and focus on operational excellence in scaling impactful legal and regulatory functions across enterprise software is critical to our continued success as a company.”

Adding, “Her leadership and expertise across both public and private markets will prove invaluable to Databricks in a time of high-growth and transition. We are excited to welcome Phi to the company and look forward to having her as an important member of our executive team.”

On her appointment, Phi shared, “The innovative spirit at Databricks is inspiring and I am thrilled to be joining a pioneering company that’s addressing the challenges and opportunities stemming from the proliferation of data. Being part of this team as we help our customers harness data in a meaningful way – not only for businesses but for the world around us – is the opportunity of a lifetime and I look forward to what lies ahead.”

Singapore – Global data and AI company and pioneer of the data lakehouse paradigm, has launched the first lakehouse platform for data-driven businesses in the media and entertainment industry. The Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment enables organizations across the media ecosystem to deliver better data and AI outcomes for consumers, advertisers and media partners with a single and collaborative platform for data, analytics and AI. 

Databricks customers like Acxiom, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SEGA are among the earliest adopters. With Brickbuilder Solutions, accelerators, and a powerful partner ecosystem, businesses can create tailored customer experiences, prepare for consumer analytics at scale, and empower increased cooperation among media teams. 

The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment integrates data solutions and use-case accelerators for essential industry use cases such as AI-driven recommendation engines, customer lifetime value and churn, quality of experience, community toxicity analysis, advertising optimization and more.

Companies may use Databricks’ powerful analytics to build a holistic view of their audience and advertisers, make real-time choices, and spur innovation. Databricks enables media companies to use all of their data – including photos, video, and other unstructured data types – to establish a comprehensive understanding of their consumers by supporting real-time analytics, business intelligence (BI), and sophisticated AI capabilities on all data kinds.

Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, Lakehouse for Media & Entertainment Solution Accelerators offers a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization’s data engineers and data scientists. 

Popular accelerators for Databricks customers in the media and entertainment industry includes recommendation engines to create more personalised customer experiences with AI-powered content recommendations that drive engagement and monetization opportunities, followed by consumer lifetime value models that easily identify and better understand the most valuable customers with CLV models that concentrate on spending patterns and retention. In order to ensure a high-quality streaming experience, it is important to examine both streaming and batch data sets to ensure a smooth experience for the user. Through the offering, it is also possible to create healthier gaming communities by utilising natural language processing to detect toxic language in in-game user comments and discussions, and this can be done in real-time.

Along with AWS, consulting partners like Cognizant and Lovelytics are accelerating the adoption of the lakehouse platform by developing Brickbuilder Solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry, tailor-made to combine the power of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform with the proven experience of partners. The Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment launches with additional support and capabilities from technology partners Labelbox and Fivetran.

Steve Sobel, global industry leader for media & entertainment at Databricks, said that executing a strategy around data, analytics and AI is more critical than ever for media companies to remain agile, competitive and data-driven as audience demands change with the rapidly evolving media landscape.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with industry leaders like AWS, Cognizant, Fivetran, Labelbox and Lovelytics to bring the Databricks Lakehouse for Media and Entertainment to the industry, and enable media leaders to personalize, monetize and innovate in delivering smarter, 1;1 experiences for consumer and advertisers across the globe,” Sobel said.

Singapore – Global data and AI company Databricks has expanded its availability on Google Cloud for customers across APAC, with availability on Google Cloud’s Singapore and Sydney. 

The move aims to help organisations across SEA to leverage Databricks on Google Cloud, creating a lakehouse capable of data engineering, data science, machine learning, and analytics on Google Cloud’s network.

The SEA expansion is a reflection of growing demand from customers looking to adopt an open, modern lakehouse architecture and accelerate their cloud data strategy. Databricks on Google Cloud in Singapore enables greater flexibility and data locality choices for customers, and delivers enhanced performance and scalability while guaranteeing local data residency requirements. It is tightly integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Big Query, Looker, and Google Cloud Storage, as well as Pub/Sub, giving customers the freedom of flexibility and access to their choice of data analytics services. 

Moreover, the expansion allows businesses across SEA and Australia to extend their existing Databricks lakehouse capabilities and can cross-leverage Google BigQuery for analytics, simplifying their data investments with an open, modern data platform for all of their analytics use cases.

Andrew Martin, Databrick’s head of South Asia, shared that they will continue to make significant investments in building their local capabilities in Singapore to meet the future needs of SEA’s rapidly growing data and AI communities.

“From fast-growing digital natives to large global enterprises, we continue to see incredible demand across the region. We are excited to work with Google to help accelerate our customers’ data and AI journey in this region together,” said Martin.

Meanwhile, Amitabh Jacob, Google Cloud’s head of technology, ISV, and solutions partnerships for APAC, noted that cloud-driven transformation will underpin SEA’s growing internet economy that is expected to be at US$1t by the end of the decade.

“Our strategic collaboration with Databricks to deliver lakehouse architecture on Google Cloud’s regional, scalable platform, and combined expertise in data engineering and AI-driven analytics, will enable companies to harness the power of data and tap into evolving digital models,” said Jacob.

In addition, the partnership also has a comprehensive ecosystem of joint partners that deliver seamless integrations and expertise across the platforms, including Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, Informatica, Qlik, and Tableau, as well as TCS, and Trifacta, amongst others.

Singapore – Global data and AI company Databricks has recently launched Databricks Lakehouse for Retail, which is a new centralized data and AI platform catered to retailers and consumer goods (CG) customers. Some of its early adapters include Walgreens, Columbia, H&M Group, Reckitt, among others.

With Databricks’ Lakehouse for Retail, data teams are enabled with a centralized data and AI platform that is tailored to help solve the most critical data challenges that retailers, partners, and their suppliers are facing. In addition, it delivers an open, flexible data platform, data collaboration and sharing, and a collection of tools and partners for the retail and consumer goods industries

Designed to jumpstart the analytics process, new Lakehouse for Retail Solution Accelerators offer a blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices to save weeks or months of development time for an organization’s data engineers and data scientists.

Some of the solutions offered include real-time streaming data ingestion, demand forecasting and time-series forecasting, as well as machine learning-powered recommendation engines.

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and co-founder at Databricks, said, “Databricks has always innovated on behalf of our customers and the vision of lakehouse helps solve many of the challenges retail organizations have told us they’re facing. This is an important milestone on our journey to help organizations operate in real-time, deliver more accurate analysis, and leverage all of their customer data to uncover valuable insights. Lakehouse for Retail will empower data-driven collaboration and sharing across businesses and partners in the retail industry.”