Databricks and Snowflake form strategic partnership

Only one in three artificial intelligence projects are successful today because enterprises are struggling with data-related problems like silos and inconsistent data sets. To address these challenges, Databricks and Snowflake have teamed up to accelerate innovation and streamline integration for customers doing big data analytics and machine learning. The cloud technology providers have developed a connector between Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform and Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse.

Today, data-driven enterprises leverage integrated solutions from both technology vendors. Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform is an end-to-end analytics platform that unifies big data and AI. Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse delivers the instant elasticity, secure data sharing and per-second pricing across multiple clouds for modern data analytics.

With an integrated solution, Databricks and Snowflake enable organizations to seamlessly leverage massive volumes of historical data with dynamic streaming data to drive powerful machine learning insights. This integration liberates organizations bogged down from the costs, limitations and maintenance of on-premise data analytics solutions. Databricks and Snowflake currently have joint customers, including Overstock.com, ShopRunner, Handshake, Hotel Tonight, and Rue Gilt Groupe.

Online flash clothing retailer Rue Gilt Groupe serves its customers with much more targeted offers based on the deeper insights it uncovers with Databricks and Snowflake. “Flash sales mean over 100,000 products change on the site every day, challenging even sophisticated recommendation engines. The success of our customer experience depends on our ability to make quick and accurate decisions based on data,” Rue Gilt Groupe’s Architect, Dr. Stephen Harrison, said. “In a seamless process we use Databricks to load all data science input data from Snowflake, our only data warehouse running at massive scale. We’re able to run myriad machine learning jobs a day against all of our data, fully leveraging the tight Databricks and Snowflake integration. This lets us easily experiment and tune algorithms for our ever changing inventory. All this power is effectively operationalized and so is at the very center of our customer experience.”

“We’re seeing an increasing need for enterprises to analyze large data sets, and to enable optimized use of Spark to clean and transform that data for machine learning and AI,” Snowflake’s Vice President of Alliances, Walter Aldana said. “Our partnership with Databricks makes it even easier to access and process large volumes of data and use dynamic streaming to drive powerful machine learning insights.”

Databricks Senior Vice President of Business Development, Michael Hoff said: “Enterprises struggle with integrating and scaling legacy analytics systems for rapidly growing data sources. Databricks and Snowflake are two innovative, fast-growing, cloud-based companies that are giving data-driven enterprises the best tools as they migrate off of legacy systems. Together we’re enabling companies to accelerate the time from data aggregation and analysis to actionable business intelligence.”

According to Matt Oslund, Senior Manager of Alliances at Clarity Insights, a big data solutions and data science consulting firm, “We work with enterprises that are striving to be insight driven. With Databricks and Snowflake, we are able to offer our customers best of breed capabilities that will enable them to quickly make data-driven business decisions.  We are enthusiastic about how our customers will be able to accelerate innovation by bringing their data and AI systems together.”