Databricks launches its first industry-specific lakehouse

Pre-packaged solutions for specific industries have been launched as cloud infrastructure projects grow more complex. Databricks is a data analytic firm that is launching a solution for retail. The promise here is to offer a fully integrated platform that can help retailers extract value from the vast volumes of data they generate, be that through traditional analytics or by using Databricks' artificial intelligence tools.

Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi said that this is an important milestone on their 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 allow data-driven collaboration and sharing across businesses and partners in the retail industry.

Walgreens, Columbia and H&M Group are some of the early users of the platform. These users get access to the full Databricks platform, but also a set of Lakehouse for Retail Solution Accelerators that offer what Databricks calls a "blueprint of data analytics and machine learning use cases and best practices" which can save new users months. There are templates for real-time streaming data ingestion, demand forecasting, recommendation engines and tools for measuring customer lifetime value in these. Customers had to assemble their own blueprints instead of Databricks offering them as part of an integrated solution.

Databricks' Lakehouse for Retail allows us to unify all of the data and store it in one place for a full range of analytic and machine learning applications. By eliminating complex and costly legacy data silos, we have enabled cross-domain collaboration with an intelligent, unified data platform that gives us the flexibility to adapt, scale and better serve our customers and patients.

Databricks has been trying to popularize the idea of the lakehouse, which combines the best of data warehouses for analytics and data lakes for storing vast amounts of raw data that has yet to be operationalized.

Databricks open-sourced Delta Lake to make data lakes more reliable.

Databricks makes it easier to bring data into the house.