Today Snowflake is officially launching the Telecom Data Cloud. Snowflake’s newest Data Cloud helps telecommunications service providers break down data silos within the business and across the ecosystem, allowing organizations to easily and securely access data in near real time, enrich it with machine learning models, and then share and analyze it to drive better decision-making. With the Telecom Data Cloud, Snowflake and its ecosystem of partners can help telecommunications service providers accelerate digital transformation, enable superior customer experiences, maximize operational efficiency, and monetize new data services.
Phil Kippen, Head of Industry, Telecommunications at Snowflake, weighs in on the current state of the industry and the value of the Telecom Data Cloud to service providers and partners.
What’s the current state of the telecom industry?
The complexity in the industry right now is significant. There are expensive 5G buildouts happening, with 6G following close behind. These buildouts are shrinking telecom profit margins and turning the focus to opportunities to monetize services and data. Simultaneously, collaborating on data, both within the business and with partners, is becoming more important to maximize operational efficiency, reduce costs, and drive innovation.
More than ever, telecoms can use their data to become a critical partner to their customers. Customer expectations are increasing because of 5G, and as a result customers need more data, both first-party and third-party data, to achieve the level of personalization today’s subscribers are looking for. At the same time, telecoms need an agile technology platform that can power AI. The future evolution of telecommunications is all about data and AI.
When it comes to data, how are you seeing service providers leverage data?
Today, service providers are leveraging data in many ways, from marketing to operations to IT. But they’re all doing it independently. By bringing a new platform to market designed for collaboration across the telecom ecosystem, we’re going to enable them to do more; for example, collaborate on data and innovate together.
Why is Snowflake launching the Telecom Data Cloud now?
The telecommunications industry is rapidly evolving and, as they change, it’s going to require a secure, highly scalable platform that enables that data collaboration. That’s why we’re bringing the Telecom Data Cloud to the market today. The Data Cloud is a powerful tool that meets the needs of service providers both now and as they move forward. Our platform can also help them monetize new services and data, which is important for revenue and business growth. Simply put, it’s about the platform and the experience we bring, providing simple solutions to complex tech challenges and making it easier for businesses to monetize data.
What value does the Telecom Data Cloud bring to partners?
The Telecom Data Cloud is an easy-to-use platform with all of our experience providing seamless solutions to businesses of all types baked-in. It’s secure, it’s flexible and highly scalable, and it’s reliable. And best of all, it’s easy to operationalize. All of this helps partners build new services with a faster time to market, allowing them to better meet their clients needs.
Our partners provide a lot of value to the platform, including integrators and consulting and technology services partners. Given this, we’re able to make the Telecom Data Cloud very useful for service providers, helping them operationalize the platform faster and provide more value-driven solutions to their stakeholders. Our partners are a critical part of the solution.
What advice do you have for service providers?
Get started now. Telecom service providers inherently face challenges around platform and process operationalization and infrastructure buildouts. We’re at a point where data is available for collaboration and monetization, and there is a lot of it. Service providers have massive amounts of data across the business—more than even large social media companies—consisting of millions and billions of observations. There is a tremendous opportunity for them to take advantage of new revenue streams through better data utilization. But they need to start using their data now since it’s going to take some time for them to operationalize it. That’s why we’ve intentionally designed our platform to be easy to use.
What it comes down to is data is a competitive advantage. The more telecoms can break down data silos and begin collaborating on and monetizing data, the faster they can bring new services to market and drive revenue growth.
Learn more about the Telecom Data Cloud.