// SCALING UP //
Data and AI company helps Future Anthem provide safer play in the gambling industry
Future Anthem is a market leader in game data science and uses Artificial Intelligence to provide actionable intelligence on safer play and improved game experience within the gambling industry . It aims to connect human behaviour with data science to build a player centric universe that is enjoyable and sustainable and is trusted by teams at Paddypower , betfair and Betfred . Chris Conroy , Chief Data Officer at Future Anthem , spoke to Intelligent SME . tech about how the company has leveraged Databricks to deliver Data-Science-as-a-Service to the global gambling industry at scale , and its role in the debate around gambling regulation .
Chris Conroy , Chief Data Officer at Future Anthem
wWhen did Future Anthem start using the Databricks platform and why did you choose it ?
We actually started using Databricks near the beginning of the company . For us , it was part of our first MVP , which is great . When we were building a platform , we went through a few decision points . I think the first one for most new tech businesses is which cloud you ’ re going to go to .
At that point , we chose Azure . With the kind of platform we wanted to build , there were some obvious elements to it . We knew we were going to be dealing with massive data . We knew that Spark would have to be a core component of the platform .
There were some decisions that were almost already made . We knew we were going into Azure , we knew we would have some sort of platform based around the data lake for storage , we knew we would be using Spark as a core framework . And ultimately , we knew that we had to deliver an end-to-end platform for data science .
We were really clear in terms of what we needed for a platform , which was something to facilitate a data product business with data science at its core .
I became very aware of Databricks at a previous company because we developed a platform within Azure . When we went through the process at Anthem , I spoke to a few different experts in terms of ‘ here ’ s the reference architecture we would like to deliver ’, and pretty much everybody said Databricks should be at the core of this .
There was one more fundamental for me , which was , given that data science is much more than models , and given that we need end-to-end processes , and I ’ m really passionate about delivering data science models as a single end-to-end entity rather
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