Overstock tries new approach to data science

US retailer Overstock is implementing Databricks’ Unified Analytics platform. This provides a serverless cloud infrastructure that enables its data science team to more efficiently build, train and deploy machine learning models. It claims that leveraging Databricks has improved Overstock.com’s data science velocity by five times, resulting in an improved customer experience.

“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,” says 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.”