SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Databricks, provider of the leading Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark™, today announced that Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) has chosen Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform to enable an enhanced customized shopping experience that drives conversions and customer lifetime value. Databricks provides a serverless cloud infrastructure that enables Overstock.com’s data science team to more efficiently build, train and deploy machine learning models. Leveraging Databricks has improved Overstock.com’s data science velocity by 5 times resulting in an improved customer experience.
Overstock.com is the premier online destination for furniture and home décor, using technology to help savvy shoppers find the best prices on top styles to create their dream homes. The retailer has millions of products for sale onsite resulting in billions of visits and pageviews in Overstock.com’s historic web logs. However, only a small percentage of these visits and pageviews were converting to purchases. Overstock.com needed to be able to quickly build and iterate user scoring models based on interactions with its website. Sifting through the massive amounts of sparse data to construct customized features proved to be an enormous computational challenge. Overstock also needed to constantly optimize the customer click-through rate to keep up with the changing market conditions throughout the year.
“We want all the data, all the time, and all in near real time in order to make smart business decisions. Instead of focusing on our critical data problems and models, our data scientists found themselves dealing with the complexities of managing infrastructure,” said Chris Robison, Head of Marketing Data Science at Overstock.com. “It was our goal to provide our data scientists with the most innovative tools that allow them to be effective at what they do best - solve data problems. With Databricks, our new cloud stack is like getting a seat in first class. It’s just the way flying (or data science-ing) should be.”
Overstock.com’s data science team saw the biggest benefits with heightened collaboration capabilities and more efficient model training — improving data science productivity and time-to-market. With Databricks, data scientists at Overstock.com can build, validate and deploy machine learning models into production in fast iterations while leveraging a variety of libraries and toolkits in addition to native Spark. Overstock.com has decreased the cost of moving models to production by nearly 50 percent and data scientists can stand up new models 5 times faster than previously required.
Read more about the customer use case in Overstock.com’s blog post here.
About Overstock.com
Overstock.com, Inc. Common Shares (NASDAQ:OSTK) / Series A Preferred (Medici Ventures’ tZERO platform: OSTKP) / Series B Preferred (OTCQX:OSTBP) is an online retailer based in Salt Lake City, Utah that sells a broad range of products at low prices, including furniture, décor, rugs, bedding, and home improvement. In addition to home goods, Overstock.com offers a variety of products including jewelry, electronics, apparel, and more, as well as a marketplace providing customers access to hundreds of thousands of products from third-party sellers. Additional stores include Pet Adoptions and Worldstock.com dedicated to selling artisan-crafted products from around the world. Forbes ranked Overstock in its list of the Top 100 Most Trustworthy Companies in 2014. Overstock regularly posts information about the company and other related matters under Investor Relations on its website, http://www.overstock.com.
About Databricks
Databricks’ mission is to accelerate innovation for its customers by unifying Data Science, Engineering and Business. Founded by the team who created Apache Spark™, Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform for data science teams to collaborate with data engineering and lines of business to build data products. Users achieve faster time-to-value with Databricks by creating analytic workflows that go from ETL and interactive exploration to production. The company also makes it easier for its users to focus on their data by providing a fully managed, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure that reduces operational complexity and total cost of ownership. Databricks, venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Battery Ventures, among others, has a global customer base that includes Viacom, Shell and HP. For more information, visit www.databricks.com.
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Media Contact:
Kristalle Cooks
P: 650-346-7810
E: kristalle.cooks@databricks.com