Kpler offers energy, financial and shipping professionals data and analytics into a variety of markets. Now, with Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Powered By Snowflake program, they can bring more efficient data to customers. Learn how Kpler expands its market reach and transforms the customer experience with Snowflake.

In the often-opaque energy, financial and shipping markets, Kpler brings rapid insights to maritime trade flows, freight, and inventories. With proprietary techniques for blending a wide range of datasets, Kpler gives commodities traders, market analysts, and supply chain professionals the transparency they need to work smarter.

Seeing a better way than delivering data on separate platforms for gas, liquids, petrochemicals, and dry commodities, Kpler wanted to bring data for all commodities together under one roof. They were keen to offer customers different ways to slice and integrate information, and as Kpler expanded their data ambitions, they needed an experienced partner who could offer new features, data-sharing capabilities, and market opportunities.

For commodities professionals, real-time information is more important than ever

For those involved in commodities freight, storage, and trade, trusted and timely insight can be hard to come by—often arriving weeks or months after a trade has happened.

And as geopolitical events have destabilized energy supplies and trade globally, getting up-to-date insights is more important than ever. “We’ve always provided transparency for commodities professionals,” said Charles Bozik, Product Marketing Manager at Kpler. “When a global crisis causes disruption in the markets, that transparency becomes even more important.”

“We are currently entering a new cycle of integration with an increased demand to access data not only from a terminal, but using means such as APIs, SDKs (software development kits), Business Intelligence Add-in (Excel, Tableau etc) and so on. It is hence crucial to allow users and companies to do so in the most efficient and reliable ways and on their own terms.” explained Baptiste Colmagro, Product Manager Data Ecosystem at Kpler. “On top of openly integrating the data, we see that our users increasingly want to use their business rules to smartly match and merge data to better derive insights to keep their competitive edge. They are also in need of better ways to collaborate on actions/decisions/workflow for teams in the same company to be more efficient. This requires a level of integration beyond the data alone, as well as an integration of the decision-making process and people. We found Snowflake was a great addition to our delivery offer to face these challenges”

Unified insights, live feeds, and simpler data sharing with Snowflake

While Colmagro and Bozik weren’t involved in the initial decisions to deploy Snowflake’s Data Cloud, they both see it as a clear choice for enabling Kpler’s ambitions. “We had clients that suggested Snowflake as an amazing tool for us, and we could see some of our largest clients were already using Snowflake themselves,” recalled Colmagro.

And with Snowflake’s collaboration tools, Kpler can also offer their data to customers in all-new ways. “Our own web tool is great for visualizing Kpler data, but some customers want to combine our data with other sources in their own data lakes,” said Colmagro. “With Snowflake’s collaboration  features, it’s really easy for them to ingest our data and get even more value from it.”

Thanks to support from Snowflake, Kpler has deployed their platform and enabled new features with minimum disruption. “It’s been a smooth process overall,” said Colmagro.  “We’ve been well supported in our endeavor to integrate Snowflake.”

Kpler simplifies customer onboarding while improving retention

Since getting started with Snowflake’s collaboration tools, many Kpler customers can now consume data faster. Kpler offered an API to clients as the main route for mass data ingestion before Snowflake, but this requires customers to build pipelines, requiring engineering effort and significant time.

“Our API works really well, but teams do not always have the relevant expertise to use an API or an SDK,” explained Colmagro. “With Snowflake’s collaboration tools, you can build the same pipeline in about 15 minutes. And that pipeline works across all our commodity data sets and every endpoint.”

Once customers establish a data sharing connection, they can bring Kpler’s data into their own data lakes to compare, contrast, and analyze it against their own intelligence. “We see customers creating brand new insights and metrics,” said Bozik. “Whether it’s investors mixing our supply insights with their own pricing information, or a fleet owner blending our performance data with weather forecasts, customers that mix our data with their own get more value from Kpler.”

Faster insights and customer training and documentation

Kpler’s new approach to data sharing also has major implications for the speed of customer insights.

While an API refreshes data every hour, Snowflake data sharing pipelines offer live data that gives customers up-to-date clarity on commodities. “It saves time for customers,” said Colmagro. “And with Snowflake, we know we’re offering them the highest quality data.”

Snowflake’s integrations with visualization tools like Tableau and Power BI also help accelerate time-to-insight for customers. “We can create ready-to-use dashboards so quickly with Snowflake,” said Colmagro. “Then, we can share them with customers to pull apart our templates and see how we put everything together.”

This serves as customer training and documentation at the same time, and it’s possible thanks to Snowflake. “We get embedded faster and more easily, and customers can start querying their data in new ways rapidly,” explained Colmagro. “It’s win-win, and Snowflake makes it much simpler for us.”

New expansion and data delivery opportunities

As a new member of Snowflake’s Powered By Snowflake program, Kpler benefits from joint marketing and go-to-market strategy alongside Snowflake’s extensive technical resources and support.

“Working so closely with Snowflake gives us a way to approach new types of clients,” said Bozik. “And the benefits are mutual: we hope Snowflake can help us build traction with financial analysts that are interested in our services, while we can help Snowflake showcase how other customers in the energy sector use its platform.”

Kpler also offers their services through the Snowflake Marketplace, bringing further benefits to both sides of the partnership. “We’re keen to get even more visibility of our data and services by offering them through the Marketplace,” said Bozik. “And when we saw there wasn’t a Marketplace category for energy data providers, we realized we could help Snowflake at the same time.”

More customer value, more revenue, and more market opportunities

With a platform that unifies data across all the commodities it tracks, Kpler can create new revenue opportunities—now, and into the future.

“The new features we can offer are helping us build business with existing customers and find new market opportunities,” said Bozik. “Snowflake helps us unlock new revenue. And we can add features over time through the platform to keep customers interested, build contracts up, and make renewals simpler.”

And with Snowflake’s Powered By Snowflake program, Kpler also has opportunities to grow their market share through co-marketing initiatives. Colmagro, Bozik, and the rest of the Kpler team are particularly excited by opportunities to speak at Snowflake events, and host sessions to show other companies how they can use Snowflake to transform their approach to data analytics.

These opportunities come at an ideal time, with Kpler recently expanding their operations to track the power industry through their recent acquisition of COR-e.

Whether expanding its market or reach, Kpler keeps a keen focus on serving their customers with Snowflake’s Data Cloud: “We’re already using a lot of Snowflake’s platform features to offer robust, reliable insights to customers,” said Colmagro. “But if we see new ways to help our customers use data more easily, we know we can quickly seize those opportunities.”