Go from Months to Hours with Databricks Marketplace for Retailers

Let's say a distributor reached out wanting to understand what factors are driving the sale of carbonated beverages from customers in their convenience store. In the past, this would require reaching out to their convenience store customers for point-of-sale data, working with additional partners to acquire weather data, and develop integrations with their own shipments and promotions data. This simple analysis would take weeks of data engineering to enable.

With the announcement of the Databricks Marketplace, this can be done in hours. Companies now can:

• Accelerate time-to-insight by enriching source data with local event data from PredictHQ, a great indicator of consumption
• Seamlessly integrate historical and forecasted weather data from Accuweather to better understand trends and tailor customer experiences
• Gain access to over 40 retailer POS sources with Crisp to better understand inventory and demand
• Securely unlock the potential of your data wherever it lives with Habu data cleanrooms

This data can be seamlessly made available to their internal Lakehouse with promotions and replenishment data. Next, using a Solution Accelerator for Demand Forecasting, for example, this new data combined with internal replenishment and promotions data creates a powerful prediction. In a few days, this distributor is able to better understand which factors drive sales, and tailor their plans accordingly.

Databricks Marketplace simplifies the challenge of rapidly extending the value of data for Retail and Consumer Goods, reducing time to value to hours and days.

Building a unified, collaborative data and AI platform

The rise of data collaboration is being driven by cutting edge retailers who are using 1st and 3rd party data sources to accelerate their business outcomes and build better customer experiences. With the creation of Delta Sharing, an open solution to securely share data from your lakehouse from any platform, which underpins Databricks Marketplace, Databricks is bringing data collaboration to a new level. While other cloud based technologies support data sharing, Databricks supports open source and expands data sharing beyond just data to also embrace ML models, notebooks and more.

Accelerated Time-to-Insight

At Data and AI Summit last month we heard over and over again from retail customers that a top priority was to get insights from their data faster than their competition. With Databricks Marketplace, customers can now accelerate time-to-insight pre-built analytics solutions specifically designed for the retail industry. These solutions include ready-to-use machine learning models, dashboards, and data connectors that help retailers gain insights from their data more quickly and reduce the time and effort required to develop custom analytics solutions from scratch, enabling faster decision-making and providing competitive advantage.

To accelerate time-to-insight, PredictHQ's easy-to-use global events API gives businesses direct access to a constantly updated and verified event database drawing on billions of data points daily. Events across 19 categories, from expos to concerts to college dates to natural disasters, are aggregated from hundreds of sources then cleansed, filtered, enriched and verified using our proprietary data pipeline.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Retailers can utilize the marketplace to access customer analytics solutions and enrich their own customer data with external sources, which can help them understand customer behavior, preferences and sentiment. By analyzing data related to customer interactions, purchase history, demographics, foot traffic and weather data retail organizations can personalize marketing campaigns, improve product recommendations, optimize pricing strategies and enhance overall customer experience.

Understanding external trends that impact customer experience is critical in retail and consumer goods. By leveraging over 170 forecast models from around the world, along with expert meteorologist insight, AccuWeather powers the most advanced digital forecasting system with Superior Accuracy™. The AccuWeather Data Suite, with more than 240 frequently refreshed parameters, is designed to help your organization increase safety, reduce liability and loss, improve customer experience and drive efficiency.

Advanced Inventory Management

The marketplace offers inventory analytics solutions that can assist retailers in optimizing their inventory management processes. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and forecasting models available in the marketplace, retail companies can accurately predict demand, optimize stock levels, reduce out-of-stock situations and minimize overstocking. This leads to improved operational efficiency, cost savings and increased customer satisfaction.

Helping to master the inventory challenge, Crisp is an open-data platform for the Consumer Goods & Retail industry. Crisp connects suppliers, retailers, and distributors with real-time point of sale and supply chain data to enable faster and holistic decision-making across all organizational functions: IT, Sales, Supply Chain, Marketing, Finance, and more.

Secure Data Access and Sharing

Databricks debuted its Delta Sharing protocol last year to provision views of data without replication or distribution to other parties using the tools already familiar to Databricks customers. Delta Sharing represented the first step towards secure data sharing within Databricks. By combining native Databricks functionality with partner clean room and sharing technology available on the Databricks Marketplace, Databricks customers now have the ability to share access to data without revealing its contents.

Habu is a global leader in data clean room software, enabling companies to benefit from the value of data collaboration while minimizing data movement. Habu connects data internally and externally with other partners, customers, and providers in privacy safe and compliant ways for better collaboration, decision making, and powerful marketing results.

Seamless Integration with Existing Infrastructure

Databricks Marketplace solutions are configured to integrate seamlessly with the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. This means that retail and consumer goods companies can easily and quickly incorporate these solutions into their existing infrastructure without typical implementation challenges. The marketplace provides an environment where different components can work together cohesively to provide an efficient, unified solution.

At Data and AI Summit this year we shared our vision for Democratizing AI and Large Language Models. This vision is only enhanced and accelerated for retail customers leveraging relevant data via the Databricks Marketplace. Ultimately, the Databricks Marketplace extends the capabilities of the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and empowers retail and consumer goods organizations to leverage advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI capabilities specific to retail and all in one unified platform.

Some other relevant providers listed on the Marketplace include: Catalina, Circana (fka IRI), Experian, Facteus, Inc, Divirod, Inc, Foursquare, LiveRamp, Precisely, SafeGraph, Weather Source

If you are interested in becoming a data provider on the marketplace, sign-up and please choose "Marketplace" as the program of interest. If you are a current or prospective customer and want to try any of these marketplace offerings we are GA! Access all of these solutions directly in your Databricks UI.

Explore Marketplace