Announcing the 2021 Databricks Data Team Award Finalists

The annual Databricks Data Team Award recognizes data teams that are harnessing the power of data + AI to deliver solutions to some of the world's toughest problems. From finding ways to help manage the COVID-19 pandemic to improving the sustainability of industrial machinery to enabling better healthcare outcomes, Databricks helps unify data engineers, scientists and analysts so they can innovate faster than ever before.

For the second year running, the Data Team Awards will be presented at the Data + AI Summit (formerly known as Spark + AI Summit), the world's largest gathering of the data community.

Here are the finalists in each of the four categories:

Data Team for Good Award

This award celebrates organizations that have used data + AI to make a positive difference in the world, delivering solutions for global challenges –– from healthcare to sustainability.

Artemis Health
Artemis Health is on a mission to help U.S. companies and their advisors make better-informed decisions about how to optimize health benefits programs for happier and healthier employees. The data team is helping to make this possible using the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to ingest and transform data that powers their Employee Benefits Analysis platform, enabling their customers to gain better insight into health care plans, usage and potential abuse. As an example, one customer was able to identify signs of opioid abuse in their employees and determine who might be "doctor shopping" or seeking prescriptions from multiple providers. They broke it down even further to see if certain office locations were more prone to opioid abuse than others. This allowed their customer to intervene and make sure employees were following safe and appropriate protocols when using their health benefits. Artemis Health is using data for good and trying to turn the world's health data into great healthcare that everyone can afford.

Daimler
Daimler, a leading global supplier of premium and luxury vehicles is on a mission to improve the sustainability of their production and supply chain operations, with a commitment to become carbon neutral by 2039. The success of this ambitious initiative is heavily reliant on harnessing the power of data and AI with eMission Platform, Daimler's centralized data hub built upon the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. eMission Platform seeks to create transparency in the whole product life cycle, assuring compliance with emission regulations while maximizing performance. Daimler's data team is collecting massive diverse sets of emissions data, standardizing it with Delta Lake, and then applying machine learning models to identify bottlenecks in fully-automated production lines. Analysts then use these insights to optimize operational efficiency, and ultimately decrease the carbon footprint of every vehicle that is brought to market. With the help of advanced analytics they achieve the ultimate goal: The right car, meeting all regulatory requirements, in the right market, on time.

Samsara
Samsara's mission is to increase the efficiency, safety and sustainability of operations that power the global economy. They are the pioneers of the Connected Operations Cloud, which allows businesses that depend on physical operations to harness IoT data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations. Samsara innovates quickly based on customer feedback to make a real impact on the world - using data to help prevent distracted driving and worksite accidents, monitor in-transit temperatures to combat food waste, and reduce the environmental footprint of their customers' operations. To keep up with their mission and the many impactful projects that are making a difference in the world, Samsara leverages the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to store, transform and analyze data, allowing their engineers, data scientists, and analysts to deliver new, meaningful products and data insights to their customers.

US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA)
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is advancing its efforts to prevent veteran suicide through data and analytics. In 2020, Databricks, a native cloud service under Microsoft Azure, became FedRAMP High and available to VA. With the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, VA was able to enhance algorithms like the Medication Possession Ratio (MPR), shortening MPR computation by 88% and expanding the scope of data to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the algorithm. MPR is one of the factors that improve prediction of suicide and missed mental health appointments by evaluating a Veteran's medication regimen. With Databricks, VA is able to quickly ingest and process over 5 million patient records (representing 130 VA Medical Centers), including 8 years of their medical history data and over 100K medications. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest health system in the US and they are using data and analytics to serve Veterans and save the lives of those who have risked so much.

Data Team Innovation Award

This award recognizes the Data Teams that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible, leading their industries by continually innovating and building solutions to solve even the most complex challenges.

Atlassian
Atlassian is a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software. Its team collaboration and productivity software help teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. Innovation is at their core. As an early adopter of the Lakehouse architecture, Atlassian has made a paradigm shift enabling data democratization at scale, both internally and externally. They have standardized upon Databricks on AWS to serve as an open and unified Lakehouse platform, enabling the company to become more data driven. Across the organization, they've seen a massive shift with over 3,000 internal users accessing the platform on a monthly basis –that's more than half of the organization leveraging data to make decisions. The data and platform teams at Atlassian are among the most innovative in the industry, leading the way with new and creative ways to capitalize on data.

John Deere
John Deere is leveraging big data and AI to deliver 'smart' industrial solutions that are revolutionizing agriculture and construction, driving sustainability and ultimately helping to meet the world's increasing need for food, fuel, shelter and infrastructure. Their Enterprise Data Lake (EDL) built upon the Databricks Lakehouse Platform is at the core of this innovation, with petabytes of data and trillions of records being ingested into the EDL, giving data teams fast, reliable access to standardized data sets to innovate and deliver ML and analytics solutions ranging from traditional IT use cases to customer applications. From IoT sensor-enabled equipment driving proactive alerts that prevent failures, to precision agriculture that maximizes field output, to optimizing operations in supply chain, finance and marketing, John Deere is providing advanced products, technology and services for customers who cultivate, harvest, transform, enrich, and build upon the land.

Virgin Hyperloop
Virgin Hyperloop is pushing the boundaries of rapid mass mobility systems with the goal of making high-speed travel more accessible than ever before, while reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and transit times. From the vehicle and track design, to determining the best travel routes, to optimizing the passenger experience, it's all being done with data. The Virgin Hyperloop data team uses the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to ingest diverse data sets, and run simulations at unprecedented speeds, to help inform critical design decisions, while also proving the business viability and low environmental impact of the system to potential partners, investors, and customers. Through the power of data + AI, Virgin Hyperloop is bringing next-generation transportation to the world.

Data Team OSS Award

This award recognizes and celebrates the Data Teams that are making the most out of leveraging, or contributing to, the open-source technologies that are defining the future of data + AI.

Adobe
Adobe has a strong commitment to open source technology and open standards. Not only do they leverage open-source technology for their own products, they extend the capability to their customers. Adobe's market-leading Experience Platform leverages the Databricks Lakehouse Platform as part of its open architecture to help drive personalization across its various applications and services. Adobe's data team is able to build solutions atop open technologies like Delta Lake and MLflow to deliver actionable insights and leverage machine learning for a full picture of their customers in real-time to deliver personalized experiences across every channel.

Healthgrades
Healthgrades' Platform division works with the nation's leading health systems to improve patient engagement and strengthen physician alignment, driving measurable financial outcomes. Hg Mercury, the company's enterprise-wide intelligent engagement platform, is a comprehensive data and SaaS platform that delivers insights and communications solutions that integrate seamlessly with the health system's broader MarTech stack and enterprise ecosystem.To make data and information more accessible to their customers, Healthgrades has adopted an open data architecture leveraging Databricks Lakehouse Platform. Healthgrades leverages machine learning algorithms to enable Health Systems to be more proactive and predictive as they engage current and potential patients. Through this open architecture, using Delta, MLflow, Airflow, Python, Scala and other open frameworks, Healthgrades has seen a decrease in the overall cost of operation, improved customer satisfaction and improved user experience. Bottom line, through open source technology, at Healthgrades, better health gets a head start.

Scribd
With over a million paid subscribers and 100 million monthly visitors, Scribd is on a mission to change the way the world reads. Through their monthly subscription, readers gain access to the best ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and much more. Scribd leverages data and analytics to uncover interesting ways to get people excited about reading. The data engineering team optimizes the Lakehouse architecture to ultimately deliver an engaging experience to their customers. Additionally, the team is contributing to multiple open source projects and they have a deep understanding of the Delta Lake OSS ecosystem.

Data Team Impact Award

This award recognizes the data teams that have done an outstanding job supporting their organization's core mission, harnessing the power of data + AI to create a massive impact.

Asurion
Tech care company Asurion helps nearly 300 million customers worldwide with repair, replacement, protection and Expert tech help for phones, home tech and appliances. Asurion Experts keep customers' tech working to keep life moving. Among the company's many initiatives to enhance the customer experience, Asurion leverages insights gleaned from Expert's interactions with customers. Asurion uses the Databricks Lakehouse platform and advanced machine learning models to power and support real-time insights collected from support calls. The rapid availability of new data enables Asurion to enhance training for Experts and help provide customized support for customers.

GSK
GSK is a global, science-led health company that specializes in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and consumer healthcare products. Through their science-based, cutting-edge products, they are changing the health and wellness of consumers around the world. The breadth of investment in D&A technology and people expertise has led to the realization of tremendous short and long-term impact already, for example cost savings in safety stock analysis and optimization. GSK's D&A platform, powered by Databricks, has supported over 100 use cases, including pricing, trading, forecasting, KPI tracking, and financial modeling, applying insights and smart decision making, ultimately supporting their purpose to help people do more, feel better and live longer.

H&M
The H&M group is a family of brands serving markets around the globe. Throughout its deep fashion heritage, dating back to 1947, H&M Group has been committed to making fashion available for everyone; now, they want to make sustainable fashion affordable and available for everyone. H&M Group has been making necessary investments in digitizing its supply chain, logistics, tech infrastructure and AI, with Databricks providing key data and analytics capabilities that enable the fast development and deployment of AI solutions to market. By harnessing the power of data and technology, H&M Group continues to lead the industry by making its operations more efficient and sustainable, while also remaining at the heart of fashion and lifestyle inspiration for their customers.

And the winner is…

The Databricks Data Team Award winners for 2021 will be announced at the Data + AI Summit at the end of May, and will be celebrated in an upcoming blog post, so check back to see which of the finalists took home the trophy.

In the meantime, check out how our customers across industries are innovating and unlocking the power of data and AI.