Databricks Enables Sellpoints to Launch a New Predictive Analytics Product

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 10, 2016) - Databricks, the company behind Apache Spark, today announced that Sellpoints, a provider of online advertising solutions dedicated to optimizing return on ad spend (ROAS) for retailers and brands, chose Databricks as their enterprise Spark solution, allowing for the rapid productization of a critical predictive analytics product. Databricks enables Sellpoints to acquire a game-changing competitive advantage through the launch of this new product, which improves the ROAS threefold for Sellpoints' customers by serving more relevant ads to shoppers based on their online behavior.

Prior to implementing Databricks, Sellpoints was severely hampered by their legacy Spark platform. Critical deficiencies such as slow performance, unreliable infrastructure, and the vendor's lack of Spark expertise drastically reduced the productivity of the Sellpoints team, blocking progress on feature productization for six months.

Databricks provided an enterprise-grade big data platform that enabled Sellpoints to rapidly build machine learning models from billions of data points and reliably deploy applications on top of Spark. The Sellpoints team instantly became more productive as they could iterate on machine learning models much faster in Databricks' integrated workspace and no longer had to maintain complex infrastructure with the Databricks platform. As a result of implementing Databricks, the Sellpoints team launched the new feature in just six weeks, gaining significant benefits including:

• Creating distinctive product differentiation: Improving the ROAS threefold compared to competitive offerings;
• Improving engineering and data science team productivity: Eliminating the time spent on DevOps and maintaining open source software;
• Democratizing access to Apache Spark throughout their organization: Reducing the time and effort required to deliver Spark-powered insights to the business team for real-time decisions while lowering costs.

"We tried to implement Apache Spark on top of our managed Hadoop clusters without Databricks and this proved to be very challenging," said Benny Blum, vice president of Product and Data at Sellpoints. "We learned quickly that if we want to use Spark, we should work with Databricks, the creators of Apache Spark."

"Similar to many of our customers, Sellpoints found deploying Apache Spark at production-scale without the right technology platform to be impossible," said Kavitha Mariappan, vice president of marketing at Databricks. "By partnering with Databricks, Sellpoints gained instant access to an enterprise-grade Spark platform that allowed their team to meet critical business objectives."

Download the Sellpoints case study: http://go.databricks.com/case-studies/sellpoints
For more information on Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/product/databricks

About Databricks:
Databricks' vision is to make big data simple for the enterprise. The company was founded by the team that created and continues to drive Apache Spark, a powerful open source data processing engine built for sophisticated analytics, ease of use, and speed. Databricks is the largest contributor to the open source Spark project providing 10x more code than any other company. The company has also trained over 20,000 users on Apache Spark, and has the largest number of customers deploying Spark to date. Databricks is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. For more information, contact info@databricks.com.