- Now that you understand the different parts
of the Lakehouse architecture and SQL Analytics,
let's look at how it's being used
by one of the largest corporations in Europe.
Unilever is a company that had the vision
to see the potential of the Lakehouse-centric architecture
very early on.
They have been building towards this vision
and they've had a number of successes
and lessons learned along the way.
To share, I'd like to welcome Phinean Woodward,
Head of Architecture and Information and Analytics
at Unilever.
Phin, thanks for joining us at Data and AI Summit Europe.
- Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here.
- So Phin, can you tell us a little bit
about Unilever's data and AI journey,
and what kind of outcomes you were looking for?
- Sure, I think it's worth just reflecting on the history.
So we, our own premises state
has grown substantially over many years and,
and it certainly served the business well,
but as it evolved over time inter-dependencies
between systems made developing solutions further
more complex in the face of increasing demand
for speed or reduced costs.
So with the emergence of cloud service providers
and platforms, this has really unlocked
the opportunity to rethink our approach
to delivering these analytical services,
to meet the ever-growing demands of our business.
Simply lifting and shifting these services
to cloud wouldn't drive down the costs
and wouldn't solve the challenges we were facing.
So we took the opportunity to completely
rethink our strategy and unlock
the new capabilities that cloud offers.
- That makes a lot of sense.
So how does the Lakehouse strategy fit in the architecture,
and where does Delta Lake fit into that picture?
- Sure, the Unilever's Lakehouse strategy has
got three layers in the architecture.
We call them the Universal Data Lake, the Business Data Lake
and the Product Data Store.
Universal Data Lake really is just a copy
of the raw data in the same format as the source system.
It's in full, there's no filtering or any transformations.
So in effect we ingest data once and only once
into the Data Lake without ever needing to go back
to the source system to extract data.
The Business Data Lake then adds business logic
and context to that data,
converting technical field names into business terminology,
harmonizing mass data, and calculating reusable KPIs.
So to sort of calculate things once and reuse many times.
And then the final layer is the Product Data Store layer,
and that's where our reporting and analytical solutions sit.
Each is built and run using DevOps and are created
and developed independently of other products.
And so therefore, each of those teams can develop
and deploy changes at their own pace.
Throughout the whole stack, Delta Lake is used to process
the huge volumes of data required efficiently and at speed.
- I would love to hear some examples
and potentially what effect they've had on the business.
- Sure, Databricks and the broader is your platform,
really formed the bedrock for all of our reporting
and analytical solutions in Unilever.
And we have a number of examples
where this has enabled us to drive growth.
One example is an analytical product built for the UK
which has enabled us to analyze category performance,
undertake competitor analysis, performed detailed SKU,
and promotion analysis.
And these really helped us to grow the category
for our customers, increase turnover for our products,
and in one example, grew store penetration
for one of our SKU's four fold.
In addition to financial benefits
users can save a lot of time in deriving these insights,
the ability to leverage the on-demand processing power
and performance that Delta Lake offers,
really enables us to process large volumes
of data at speed, and removes the need for manual efforts.
Using this can really then focus on deriving the insights
and taking the actions needed to really unlock
the benefits for the business.
- That's really great to hear.
As technologists, you know, we're always deep in the tech
but it's so awesome to hear the use cases
and how they're affecting the business.
So how does that affect things
like cost, scalability and performance?
- The key benefits that I see
is the immense flexibility which it offers us.
The ability to use products without needing
to buy licenses, without having to forecast,
buy, implement and manage infrastructure.
To leverage the auto-scale capability
that Databricks offers, really delivers us the amount
of commute, compute we need just at the right time
to process large volumes of data.
And that really drives great value
for meeting our business objectives,
and driving our digital agenda.
- That makes sense.
And what kind of analytics workloads
do you foresee in the future moving into the Lakehouse?
- I think in short, the Lakehouse really will be
the foundation for all of Unilever's analytical products
and workloads in the future.
As technologies evolve, we will increasingly drive more
advanced analytics, machine learning and AI
into the products that we are building
and the data that we have captured, curated and stored
in the Data Lake.
- And do you have any advice for others that are embarking
on their journey as they set up their Lakehouse strategy?
What would be some of, sort of, words of advice be for them?
- Cloud allows you to implement some
of the best technologies available
to drive down costs, deliver data
to the business quicker than ever before.
But if the trust in that data is ever questioned,
then in my mind the whole Data Lake strategy is put at risk.
So my top recommendation really would be invest time
and effort to ensure that the Data Lake
is the single source of truth,
that the data and KPIs therein
are cataloged, not duplicated and made available
to all who need to use them.
That for me is the key to the strategy being a success.
- And curating your Data Lake is then key to that.
- Absolutely, fundamental.
- Thank you so much Phin.
- It's a pleasure.
- We're really excited to be working
with customers like Unilever.
They've been leading by example
on the Lakehouse architecture and already realizing
the incredible value that Delta Lake brings.