Applied Materials is a leading semiconductor and materials engineering company that designs and manufactures the equipment used to make virtually every new chip in the world. Behind that equipment sits an equally critical asset: a vast estate of engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and finance data that the company has long brought together in a central data lake.

The original lake, built on Hadoop, did its job — it consolidated the data. But the demands had changed: AI workloads, real-time analytics, governed self-service and use cases the original architecture was never designed for required a new approach. Applied Materials uses the Databricks Platform to modernize that foundation — moving from a storage-and-batch data lake to a lakehouse where governance, analytics and AI live together. The shift was less about consolidating data than about unlocking what could ultimately be done with it.

What started as a platform modernization has become more of a way of working. AI now sits alongside the people who design the machines that make the world's chips — not as a tool they pick up occasionally, but as a day-to-day collaborator. Data runs through the full lifecycle of how Applied Materials operates, from insight to action, making "data-driven" less a slogan than the default mode of innovating, optimizing and deciding.

Virgin Atlantic was founded by entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson in 1984, with innovation and amazing customer service at its core. Headquartered in London, the airline operates flights to 28 destinations year-round. Alongside its shareholder and partner, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic operates a leading transatlantic network with onward connections to over 200 cities worldwide.