At Snowday 2021, Snowflake announced exciting new product capabilities that expand what is possible in the Data Cloud. In addition to announcing Python support in Snowpark (currently in private preview), these latest innovations make it easier for organizations to maintain business continuity across clouds and regions; help data engineers and data scientists build pipelines, ML workflows, and data applications faster; and remove the complexity of getting the right data into the hands of customers.
The Snowflake Data Cloud is a global network connecting organizations through data, creating new opportunities for collaboration to improve business outcomes, and fundamentally changing what is possible across industries. For Kraft Heinz, its data science teams are able to build and test models dramatically faster in Snowflake compared with its prior data lake. For NBCUniversal, it’s building brand-new advertising targeting and measurement products, in a secure and privacy-compliant way using Snowflake’s governance and data sharing capabilities. And for 84.51°, it’s built a Collaborative Cloud that takes complexity off the table and unlocks new possibilities for grocers and CPGs sharing and collaborating on data.
Snowflake continues to expand the scope and possibilities of the Data Cloud, delivering unique innovations that enable customers to:
- Operate globally
- Eliminate silos
- Build faster
- Create new businesses
Operate Globally
Snowflake delivers a seamless, unified experience that spans across clouds and regions, enabling customers to operate some of the most sophisticated global environments with ease. Building on its existing cross-cloud replication and failover capabilities that unlock unmatched levels of business continuity, Snowflake announced significant improvements in data replication efficiency, resulting in up to a 55% performance improvement as experienced by one of Snowflake’s largest customers, which in turn translates to a 55% reduction in customer replication costs since Snowflake customers only pay for what they use.
In addition, Snowflake has further simplified global operations with the announcement of cross-cloud and cross-region account replication in private preview. With this new capability, entire account metadata, including everything from identity and role-based access controls to governance policies to resource monitors, can now be automatically synchronized across clouds and regions for continuous availability, while ensuring point-in-time consistency with the primary region. Paired with the recently announced client redirection ability now in public preview, these make it even easier for organizations to deliver near-zero disruption to their customers and data consumers, even in the event of a data center outage or natural disaster.
Snowflake has also expanded its native governance capabilities, so customers can operate globally while ensuring data protection and security. With lineage visibility in Access History (private preview), customers can know the lineage of data both coming from external sources and as it flows within Snowflake. This enables compliance teams to track sensitive data sources to satisfy compliance requests, and data teams get the visibility to better understand and trust the data they’re working with. Further, Object Dependencies is coming soon to private preview to help teams identify which objects depend on other objects, so they can assess potential downstream impacts of modifying objects and push changes with confidence. Snowflake also announced the new Governance Accelerated Program, featuring an entire ecosystem of partner-delivered solutions and integrations to help customers discover and protect data.
Eliminate Silos
“One of the most critical aspects of breaking down silos is having a unified and consistent experience across all types of data,” Snowflake’s SVP of Product Christian Kleinerman said. “Our goal at Snowflake is to provide our customers with a single platform that simplifies the process of storing and extracting value of data across all these dimensions, and most importantly, without compromising on governance or performance.” With unstructured data support in public preview, Snowflake is delivering a unified and consistent experience across various types of data. This includes the ability to leverage data sharing with secure views referencing unstructured data or enrich that data through the Snowflake Data Marketplace.
Bringing together data from structured to semi-structured to unstructured has not only allowed customers such as Novartis, Aflac Global Investments, and Kount, an Equifax Company, to build performant and governed data lakes on Snowflake, but has also helped customers unlock new levels of agility to quickly implement emerging architectural patterns. One example is implementing a data mesh, which brings together decentralized global teams through a common infrastructure, with customers such as Siemens, DPG Media, Flexport, and Capital One benefiting from this approach.
Build Faster
Snowflake was designed with simplicity at its core, making it the platform of choice for analytics, data processing, application development, and much more. In particular, one of the most popular uses is for end-to-end pipeline development and Snowflake continues to improve upon this. Starting at data ingestion, Snowflake has delivered ingestion improvements for Snowpipe with a majority of customers experiencing median latency reductions between 50–68% across all clouds. And with serverless tasks now in public preview, this drastically reduces the operational overhead necessary for developing, deploying, and maintaining pipelines.
While these are powerful building blocks, the introduction of Snowpark (public preview), Snowflake’s developer framework, is expanding the scope of what’s possible and shaping the future of data engineering and data science.
“Consistently, I hear how data engineering teams want better options for working with data, simpler environments, and eliminating the need to move data out of Snowflake,” Kleinerman said. “With Snowpark, we’ve changed all of that, so now these teams can leverage existing skills and build through a familiar model but obtain better performance, greater simplicity, and new levels of security and governance.”
Snowday included a flurry of advancements in Snowpark, including Python support, Java Stored Procedures, and the ability to process unstructured data using Java functions (all in private preview). For full details on the Snowpark announcements, check out this blog post.
Create New Businesses
The Data Cloud allows customers to discover, share, and collaborate on first- and third-party data. Through its Data Marketplace, Snowflake has dramatically simplified the process for commercializing data products by allowing users to discover and transact with data providers directly in the Marketplace and enabling a “try before you buy” option. Users can also take advantage of flexible usage-based pricing models in the Data Marketplace. All of these capabilities are currently in private preview.
And the Data Cloud continues to grow, enabling all our customers to access the most relevant, valuable data as soon as they need it. The number of marketplace listings available in the Snowflake Data Marketplace has grown 34% from June to October, provided by over 200 partners, and the number of stable edge connections has continued to grow, representing the ongoing relationships between providers and consumers. Data providers are also seeing significant growth in terms of new customers and new business. For example, by the end of June, ZoomInfo drove $1 million in ACV growth for its business after just six weeks of listing on the Snowflake Data Marketplace. FactSet has also increased the total number of clients using its financial services data in the Snowflake Data Cloud by 88% year over year.
“From operating globally, to eliminating silos, to building faster, to creating new businesses through data, there are virtually no limits to what’s possible in the Data Cloud,” Kleinerman said. “These latest innovations are built with the goal to help our customers continue advancing the state of the art in technology and redefine what’s possible in terms of business outcomes.”
To view the content from Snowday, please click here.
Forward-Looking Statements
This post contains express and implied forwarding-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2021 that Snowflake has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forwarding-looking statements as predictions of future events.
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