Product descriptions:
HP Indigo is a leading developer and manufacturer of digital printing solutions, delivering high-quality industrial and commercial print technologies to customers worldwide. HP Indigo faced challenges with disparate legacy systems and manual data tracking that slowed decision-making and limited operational visibility. To unify its data and empower employees with reliable, trusted insights, they turned to Databricks and Unity Catalog.
Bringing disparate data systems together
HP Indigo's legacy systems presented significant challenges that hindered its ability to make data-driven decisions across its industrial print business. The company relied on disparate data warehouses and manual data files spread across different systems including ERPs, manufacturing platforms, and field data sources. In total, HP Indigo was managing more than 3,500 data volumes (~10 terabytes) across hundreds of jobs and pipelines, with data spanning performance analytics, telemetry, and operational systems.
The lack of standardization across these data sources created substantial obstacles. Some critical data was tracked manually in spreadsheets across different parts of the company, making it nearly impossible to maintain a single source of truth. Without unified business processes, HP Indigo struggled to reconcile its data sources and ensure accuracy. Teams spent days tracing parts and analyzing data across disconnected systems, sometimes halting production while waiting for answers. HP Indigo needed a solution that could centralize its data and deliver the visibility and traceability required to operate efficiently at scale.
A Unified Platform for Data Management
After evaluating options for modernizing its data infrastructure, HP Indigo selected Databricks and Unity Catalog as its unified solution. The ability to manage structured and unstructured data, integrate with existing systems, and support phased migration made Databricks the right choice. HP Indigo was able to run legacy solutions in parallel during migration, ensuring business continuity throughout the transformation.
HP Indigo is now migrating its legacy data warehouses and manual data files to Databricks, bringing together its entire industrial print business on a single platform. The company leverages Lakehouse Federation to govern data outside of Databricks and uses Delta Sharing, with plans to extend governed data sharing to external vendors in the future. Key manufacturing and traceability workloads are already live on Databricks.
Unity Catalog has proven particularly valuable in addressing HP Indigo's data standardization and traceability challenges. Built-in lineage provides end-to-end visibility across manufacturing, field, and customer data, allowing HP Indigo to track consumables from manufacturing through consumption at customer sites. This end-to-end data lineage connects all business silos with clear traceability, enabling HP Indigo to identify gaps in its data collection processes and improve both business processes and data quality. “Traceability with data lineage on Unity Catalog was a real breakthrough. Suddenly we could see the data flow from start to finish,” said Alona Gybuch, IT GTM and Data Section Manager. “If we find data missing during an analysis, we can pinpoint where to correct our business process to enable more data gathering. This visibility encourages collaboration across teams and helps continuously improve our solution.”
In addition to its existing BI solutions in Tableau and Power BI, HP Indigo implemented Databricks AI/BI Genie to accelerate access to trusted data across the organization. Genie enables business users to ask questions in natural language and receive answers directly from Unity Catalog–governed data, reducing dependency on technical teams. In manufacturing and R&D environments where delays are costly, this self-service access helps teams validate analyses faster, explore hypotheses independently, and make informed decisions with confidence.
Faster Data, Better Decisions and Significant Cost Savings
The migration to Databricks has delivered measurable improvements. Tracing manufactured consumables through HP Indigo’s legacy systems took two to three days, often requiring production to pause during critical analyses. With Unity Catalog, that process now takes just 60 minutes. “In the case of a critical analysis, we would have to stop production for those days, so this improvement to 60 minutes has a huge impact," said Nadav Drori, Industrial Print CIO.
Beyond speed, Databricks has improved data quality and trust across the organization. With near real-time insights and a single source of truth, HP Indigo's teams can make better data-driven decisions and identify potential issues before they escalate. "The improvements we've made with Databricks have led to increased trust in our data, which not only helps us make better decisions, it also enables us to avoid critical issues much earlier, before a crisis occurs," said Victoria Mashur, IT Data Engineering Manager.
HP Indigo is also leveraging Databricks as the foundation for its AI initiatives. The company recently developed a prediction model for one of its manufactured parts, using Databricks to optimize production parameters. "Leveraging this prediction model in Databricks, we increased the yield from 60% to 92%. This helped us change the parameters within the manufacturing line, leading to a more successful production process and final product," said Kobi Vaknin, Former IT Product for Manufacturing.
Building on the success of this initial use case, HP Indigo sees strong potential to expand predictive capabilities across additional manufacturing lines and into areas such as maintenance and quality. With the Databricks Platform in place, the focus is now on prioritizing high-ROI use cases and scaling success through business adoption.
When implementing AI/BI Genie, HP Indigo took the opportunity to establish role-level security and simplified naming conventions, making information easier for users to navigate. This combination of governance, self-service, and AI reflects HP Indigo’s broader transformation strategy. "This is a culture change, in addition to being a technology change,” said Joanna Cohen, Data Community Manager and Data Transformation Program Lead. “Databricks helps by removing unnecessary barriers and giving teams permission-based access to data in a single catalog that's approved by all the data owners. That trust is essential to transforming not just our technology, but how we make decisions as a business.”
