Around the World with Databricks and Anomalo: Learnings from the Data + AI World Tour

This fall, Anomalo had the privilege of joining the Databricks Data+AI World Tour, visiting six cities in five time zones across Europe and North America to discuss how industry-leading customers and data leaders are transforming business and operations with data and AI. From London to Los Angeles, the conversations we hosted were inspiring and enlightening, underscoring the key role of data quality to drive insights, analytics, and Gen AI readiness.

As the only data quality platform backed by Databricks Ventures, Anomalo’s unique approach to automating data quality resonates with enterprise teams that understand the need for scalable, secure data quality monitoring in today’s sprawling data landscape.

   
This fall, Anomalo met customers and hosted executive conversations around the world.

What We Heard from Customers Around the Globe

From our three months on the road, a common thread emerged: data quality as the cornerstone of enterprise data and AI investments. Just as our presence at dbt Coalesce 2024 indicated, data leaders recognize that unreliable or inconsistent data can derail even the best-funded AI projects, highlighting the need for proactive data quality monitoring and validation. 

Across geographies, customers are putting high-quality data at the center of their data and AI projects.

At three World Tour destinations, we hosted executive fireside chats with enterprise leaders from:

• Lebara, a leading telecommunications company. Matt Crawley, Chief Data Officer, added Anomalo to his team’s data stack to monitor the integrity of their Databricks tables, ensuring the accuracy of customer insights and business decisions. He joined us in London to share how Anomalo saves Lebara 5,000 person-hours annually and helps catch 80% of data issues proactively.
• ADP, a Fortune 500 payroll and HR solutions provider. Kristin Hlavinka, Director of Enterprise Data Governance, counts on Anomalo to support her team’s enterprise-wide data strategy. Kristin joined us in New York to discuss how ADP went from 700 manual checks to 16,000+ machine learning-powered validations with Anomalo.
• Nationwide, one of the largest insurance and financial services companies. Mike Randall, Director of Enterprise Data Governance, brought in Anomalo to monitor their massive Databricks footprint, comprising over 13,000 databases with 5,000 in production. He joined us in Chicago to share how Anomalo is helping Nationwide lay the foundations for Gen AI while replacing 3,000 custom business rules with out-of-the-box monitoring.

Through these conversations, it became clear that the challenges and priorities align closely with what Anomalo brings to enterprise customers today:

• Trust in Data: Customers are looking for tools that give them confidence in their data by catching issues before they escalate.
• Rules Don’t Scale: Enterprises are dealing with an unprecedented amount of diverse, evolving data from multiple sources. Anomalo empowers organizations to monitor and trust this data without manual effort or scaling teams.
• Streamline and Simplify: Seamless integrations with existing tools and platforms, like Databricks and Azure Databricks, ensures that teams can adopt Anomalo without adding to their already complex toolchain.
• Enterprise-Grade Security: Enterprise data is messy, sensitive, and often highly restricted. Anomalo guarantees compliance with stringent security requirements and offers deployment directly in customer environments (In-VPC or BYOC).

What’s new? What’s next?

As we wrap up the World Tour, we’re thrilled to share another milestone: Anomalo is now live on the Azure Marketplace and eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). This means customers running Azure Databricks workloads can seamlessly integrate Anomalo while leveraging their existing Azure agreements and budgets. 

If you’re ready to take your data quality to the next level, visit Anomalo on the Azure Marketplace today or request a demo to learn more.

Finally, this wouldn’t be an Anomalo reflection without surfacing anomalous data from our time on tour! Anomalo excels at detecting anomalous data so data teams can take action before it affects downstream models, dashboards, and reports. 

Anomalo helps modern enterprises understand and resolve issues in the data powering their business. Our superpower is AI-powered monitoring: automatically detecting data quality issues before any downstream impact.

These are our favorite expectation-defying stats about each of the six cities we visited:

• London: Almost half of greater London’s surface area (47%) is “green,” about ⅔ of that being wild or public and another ⅓ as private gardens. This interplay of nature and urbanity create an ideal habitat for foxes, with an estimated population of over 10,000!
• New York has half the national average of grocery stores per capita. In fact, city residents spend over $1 billion annually on groceries outside the city limits.
• Atlanta has 71 streets with Peachtree in the name, and Georgia is known as the Peach State. So it surprised us to learn that it’s not the top peach-producing state; Georgia is #3 behind agricultural powerhouse California, and even more unexpectedly, its smaller neighbor, South Carolina.
• Los Angeles has its movie stars and beaches, but it’s also home to the most donut shops relative to its population, with nearly 1,500 independent shops. Many of them have signs that look like enormous donuts, an anomalous shape compared to the low-rise housing and palm trees that characterize the Southern California urban landscape.
• Chicago has 37 movable bridges, the most in North America and second worldwide behind Amsterdam. They lift on a set schedule—we always appreciate when disruptions are planned!
• Toronto is home to the world’s longest continuous underground pedestrian network, the PATH, at over 30 km (19 miles) of walkable passageways that connect office buildings, transit stations, and more. A related anomaly: it hosts the world’s largest underground sidewalk sale every year!

The Databricks Data + AI World Tour may have ended with 2024, but the momentum continues. We’re inspired by the innovative ways our customers are using data and AI, and we remain dedicated to helping you achieve your data and AI goals with confidence. See you in 2025!