Snowflake Computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud, announced its newest and most transformative innovation, extending the modern data warehouse to the world’s first data sharehouse. Snowflake continues to deliver on its founding vision of removing all technology barriers that prevent enterprises from acquiring complete insight from any and all available data.
Now, any enterprise can share any part of its data warehouse, in a governed and secure way, with any other enterprise and without the delays, cost and friction of existing methods that provide only primitive mechanisms for data publishing, access and control. And unlike data consortiums, which can limit how organizations use data, Snowflake is a data market open to all organizations, removing another barrier that inhibits enterprises from accessing limitless data.
Modern data sharing enables organizations to easily forge one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships to share their data in new ways that generate revenue and insight. Here are just some of the many use cases:
- Data sharing as a product – Share live data as a service so data consumers can enrich their own existing data.
- Data sharing for business efficiencies – Share live data with business partners to optimize costs, streamline operations and better serve customers.
- Data sharing to unite data silos – Acquire a single source of truth by sharing between hundreds of data silos across dozens of business units within a single enterprise.
- Data sharing as a product differentiator – Any organization that generates data can provide additional value by offering its customers the ability to perform custom analytics on complete, live data.
Until recent years, enterprises could focus only on storing and analyzing data generated inside their organizations. Then the Internet, social networking, mobile computing and the IoT caused a surge in the volume, variety and velocity of available data. Unfortunately, technical and business limitations forced enterprises to focus on just a subset of that data.
With Snowflake Data Sharing, the technology that turns a modern data warehouse into a data sharehouse, businesses of any size can now share their live, ready-to-use structured and semi-structured data, and consume the same types of data from other enterprises. This innovation requires no copying or movement of data and enables enterprises to address new markets, offer new and enhanced products and services and drive new revenue and business efficiencies never possible with just their own data. All the while, there’s no additional cost for Snowflake Data Sharing and the business agreements for sharing data are direct between data providers and consumers with no involvement from Snowflake.
Snowflake has redefined what’s possible for data analysis within and between organizations,” Snowflake’s CEO, Bob Muglia said. “Snowflake Data Sharing transforms data into a product, a true business asset. Our established and recent customers have been using Snowflake Data Sharing in ingenious ways to redefine their data analytics and their business operations to bolster their competitive advantage. Best of all, the business models that data sharing companies create with one another are their own, without any involvement from Snowflake.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Snowflake’s infrastructure partner, continues to lead with state-of-the-art cloud architecture, which helped enable Snowflake’s vision of the data sharehouse. “Customers are moving to the cloud for agility and flexibility, but also to enable innovative and disruptive business models,” said Ken Chestnut, Global Segment Lead, Amazon Web Services. “Snowflake Data Sharing enables companies to easily share and collaborate around data to deliver new capabilities, products and business innovations.”
Using simple commands, an enterprise can share or acquire live and secure, read-only access to any part of a data warehouse with and from other enterprises. The benefits of Snowflake Data Sharing include:
- Natively store all structured and semi-structured data once and share limitlessly with no data movement for fastest time-to-value.
- Direct and simple access to live data without the intermediate, complex and delaying steps of outdated data sharing methods such as email, FTP, EDI and APIs.
- Fully secure and governed data with all benefits of Snowflake’s modern data warehouse.
- A complete cloud sharing environment that eliminates the need and cost to store another enterprise’s data. Data providers do not incur a cost for sharing data and data consumers only pay for the compute resources they use on the data shared with them.
- Data sharing business agreements are direct between data providers and consumers. Snowflake remains focused on delivering the world’s best data warehouse, and now, the world’s only data sharehouse.
A number of enterprises have already added Snowflake Data Sharing to their strategy to advance their operations, better serve their customers and create new market opportunities:
Localytics is a Boston-based mobile engagement platform company. Localytics gives hundreds of the world’s top brands insights about their mobile users and the tools to engage with those users. Localytics Direct Access, powered by Snowflake Data Sharing, lets customers access Localytics data without exporting anything first, solving one of the biggest data challenges marketers face. Previously, users had to connect different sources of customer data from CRM systems, Business Intelligence (BI) tools, mobile analytics and other sources. Data was often exported and copied into other platforms to be manipulated and further analyzed. This process produced multiple copies of the data living in many places, increasing costs, complexity and inconsistent results. “Customers immediately saw that Snowflake Data Sharing could potentially eliminate their ETL processes,” Localytics Director of Engineering, Michal Klos said. “That’s extremely important because they have overburdened data teams and don’t want to maintain a data warehouse. Our customers are very happy because the Snowflake solution saves them a lot of time and effort.”
PlayFab provides a backend platform for operating games post-launch with powerful real-time tools and services. The PlayFab platform includes player relationship management, tournaments and leaderboards, in-app commerce, content management and automation tools to reduce player churn and boost engagement and monetization. PlayFab uses Snowflake Data Sharing to significantly upgrade PlayFab’s already powerful analytics tools by giving studios live access to their game data. “Rich data is the lifeblood of modern games. To succeed, game developers need immediate, direct access to all their data,” PlayFab CEO and co-founder, James Gwertzman said. “However, only the largest studios could afford comprehensive data warehouses or the most advanced analytics tools. Now, with Snowflake Data Sharing, every PlayFab customer can have a world-class data warehouse, pre-populated with all their data, and updated in near real-time. By democratizing access to data, we’re fulfilling our long-term vision of giving gaming developers of all sizes equal access to the industry’s most powerful LiveOps tools.”
Snagajob’s mobile sourcing and hiring tools connect 75 million registered hourly workers to Snagajob’s business subscribers, which represent 300,000 employer locations. Snagajob shares its data with an external vendor, which uses the data to reach out to Snagajob clients via targeted re-engagement campaigns. Snagajob is also evaluating Snowflake Data Sharing to share data with its enterprise customers that want to perform analytics on their previous sourcing and hiring activities. “Before Snowflake, it was a massive endeavor to package up the data and send it over the public Internet, which isn’t always secure. Then, each customer or vendor had even more work to get any value from it,” Snagajob’s Principal Architect, Robert Fehrmann said. “Snowflake eliminated all of this. It’s the Holy Grail of data analytics.”
PlaceIQ is a leading data and technology provider that powers critical business and marketing decisions with location data, analytics and insights. Its diverse customer portfolio includes leading brands in retail, automotive, CPG, dining and global investment companies. PlaceIQ will make its data available via Snowflake Data Sharing to make it easy for their data clients to combine geolocation with other forms of data in order to better understand the customer journey and inform other key business decisions. PlaceIQ chose to leverage Snowflake to avoid the traditional, delayed and costly forms of data sharing and to increase the flexibility of innovative data exploration for their clients and partners. “Our vision is to get the data directly into the hands of business decision-makers and give them a tool in which they can analyze and make decisions immediately,” PlaceIQ Co-founder and CTO, Steve Milton said. “The days of a customer using one data set are long over. Most people in the data marketplace are aggregating many data sets to solve problems as effectively as they can, which is where Snowflake delivers real value.”
From the very first days, Snowflake’s pioneers wanted to enable a multitude of technical and business possibilities with groundbreaking technology.
When we defined the initial Snowflake architecture, we understood there was potential to share data across organizations. But we needed time to put all the security mechanisms in place,” Snowflake CTO and Co-founder Benoit Dageville said. It’s very gratifying to see the customer reaction to this innovative capability.”
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