The rise of the data lakehouse: A new era of data value

With 65 million vaccine doses to administer at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Luigi Guadagno, vice president of pharmacy renewal and healthcare platform technology at Walgreens, needed to know where to send them. To find out, he queried Walgreens’ data lakehouse, implemented with Databricks technology on Microsoft Azure. “We leveraged the lakehouse to understand the moment,” he says. For Guadagno, the need to match vaccine availability with patient demand came at the right moment, technologically speaking. The giant pharmaceutical chain had put its lakehouse in place to address just such challenges in its quest, to, as Guadagno puts it, “To get the right product in the right place for the right patient.”