When I mention data sharing to customers, they often say “really”? From that moment forward, the discussion is no longer about replacing their data analytics platform. It’s about growth. Growth of their business, growth of their ecosystem, and growth from the limitless possibilities of sharing live data in a matter of minutes.
Today, we announced the most significant breakthrough of Snowflake’s data warehouse built for the cloud – Snowflake Data Sharing. It extends our data warehouse to what we call the data sharehouse.
The revolutionary architecture of Snowflake paves the way for the data sharehouse. All of the unique benefits Snowflake provides inside the enterprise extends the data warehouse outside the enterprise. No other technology offers such a quick, powerful and inexpensive way to share live data between organizations. A data sharing model that provides read-only access to an enterprise’s entire data warehouse, or just a secure slice of data. No copying and no moving of data required.
The commercial use of sharing data emerged from Nielsen Corporation in 1923. Over the next century, enterprises adopted different data sharing models but with minimal success. Even the digital data sharing methods they’re forced to use today haven’t changed much. But the data sharehouse enables one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many data sharing models. And since Snowflake was built for the cloud, the opportunities to share data are endless.
Only when a truly unique product or service emerges, one that is innovative and appeals to nearly every enterprise, that’s when a new market is born. And with the data sharehouse, a true market for sharing data sharing has begun. Unlike other markets, Snowflake has focused on building the infrastructure, the platform, for enterprises to do business with each other.
And unlike data consortiums, which define the interactions between companies and impose fees on transactions, Snowflake data sharing is open to all organizations, removing another barrier that inhibits enterprises from accessing limitless data. The business opportunity that data sharing enables is fully owned by the data providers and consumers. Snowflake is focused on providing the data sharehouse that enables data sharing, without any entanglement in the business of the data providers and consumers. At its core, Snowflake is a database, not a marketplace.
With Snowflake Data Sharing, organizations will share more data with the partners in their ecosystem to improve business efficiencies. They’ll determine that some of their data is just as valuable to other, non-competing companies. And they’ll inquire from other organizations about data they don’t have, and negotiate access to that data. Live data sharing also means that enterprises with vast landscapes populated with dozens or even hundreds of disparate data silos, acquired by years of growth and acquisition, will be able to unite nearly all of their data.
As exciting as this is, what will truly astonish is what’s possible with the data sharehouse that we have yet to imagine. Modern data sharing will enable organizations across industry and across the globe to imagine new ways of doing business, new ways to solve longstanding problems, and provide new insights into manufacturing, healthcare, science and humanitarian issues, to name a few. Until now, there was no easy way to connect enterprises with one another through data. Well, those days are over. The data sharehouse has arrived.