Secrets of Migration Success: Customer Stories and Outcomes

One of the best parts of my job is talking to leaders about their big business goals — the ones that feel ambitious, aspirational and forward-thinking. While these goals vary widely across organizations, success often hinges on the maturity of their data strategy and the power of their underlying data foundation. 

In talking to companies across industries about what they value in a data foundation, a number of questions consistently emerge: Can our data platform turn our generative AI ambitions into reality? Can it equip every team, not just a privileged few, with fast, powerful insights to make better decisions? Can it reliably keep data secure and daily operations humming? 

In evaluating these questions, many business and technical leaders are realizing that their current data platform falls short, causing them to move from traditional on-premises or cloud-hosted data warehouses to Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. In doing so, they’re building a unified data foundation that delivers simplicity, performance and flexibility for today and tomorrow — all with governance and AI capabilities built in, not bolted on. 

Helping organizations through a migration — and then seeing the tremendous results they achieve — is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. In the new book “Secrets of Snowflake Migration Success,” we’re spotlighting some of these exciting stories from customers as varied as Penske, Siemens, PayPal and Guitar Center. 

Here are just a few examples of leading organizations that have migrated from their legacy data platforms to Snowflake to reap long-term savings, improve performance and accelerate time to market to delight customers sooner. 

AT&T provides faster insights while lowering estimated annual costs by 84%

Founded in 1885, AT&T provides smart solutions and mobile and broadband services to more than 100 million U.S. consumers and almost every Fortune 1000 company. To meet high demand and deliver a stellar customer experience, AT&T needs a powerful system to process hundreds of petabytes of data every day. But its complex on-premises systems, including Hadoop, were slowing down business — and increasing costs. 

With Snowflake, AT&T now derives more value from its data, boosting performance while lowering costs. With Snowflake’s separation of storage and compute, AT&T deploys new features or products for different business units without affecting each other, enabling faster and more agile responses to user needs. While launching new solutions for internal teams previously took weeks or months, now it takes just days. By migrating its reporting application to Snowflake, AT&T now has superior performance and lower costs. Self-service users receive quick responses that help teams everywhere make faster, more informed decisions that can ultimately drive revenue and deliver a better experience to customers.

Benefits include: 

• Faster time to launch new features and products to internal teams — going from weeks or months to just days
• 84% lower estimated annual costs 
• 90% of data requests now come back in less than one second

Pfizer accelerates insights while lowering costs by 57%

Pfizer’s purpose is breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. Timely access to data is critical for any pharmaceutical company. Yet as Pfizer grew through mergers and acquisitions, so did the company’s data silos. Data was distributed across a variety of systems — in Oracle databases, Amazon S3 files, Teradata, multiple data lakes, even spreadsheets on people's desktops.

For years, the company had the vision of One Pfizer: bringing everyone’s data together in one easily accessible, shareable location. But it wasn’t until Pfizer adopted Snowflake that everything started to click. Now with all their data unified in a single source of truth, business units across Pfizer — from commercial operations, sales and marketing to manufacturing and global supply chain — can easily access and share information for greater productivity and faster decisions. This shift has improved business continuity for the global organization while enabling teams such as global supply to gain better visibility into the entire supply chain for better forecasting. 

Benefits include: 

• 19,000 annual hours saved
• 4x faster data processing with Snowpark
• 57% lower total cost of ownership, with 28% reduction in overall database costs vs. the previous solution 
• 40 seconds — vs. an hour previously — to generate reports for field reps, enabling salespeople to be more efficient with their client visits

Luminate amps entertainment analytics with 300% faster data processing and richer insights

Luminate provides essential information across music, film and television, which includes powering the long-standing Billboard music charts. Data is Luminate’s entire business — the company receives more than 3.5 terabytes of data every day, in different formats, from different sources. The data team knew that the faster and more seamlessly it could deliver data, the easier it would be to maintain trust and deliver results. But the company’s on-premises legacy technology was “woefully outdated.” 

To modernize its tech stack, Luminate moved from on-premises solutions like Spark and SQL Server to Snowflake. With Snowflake at the core of its data lake architecture, the company views years’ worth of data holistically and combines it with additional data sources — providing unique, cross-industry insights that go beyond simple viewership and consumption numbers. Thanks to Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, customers can now get data in a few minutes rather than having to wait a few days.

Benefits include: 

• 334% faster daily processing for over a trillion data points, allowing Luminate to run market reports overnight instead of taking a full month — a game changer for delivering timely data to customers
• Accelerated product development, time to market and AI/ML experimentation thanks to Snowflake’s ease of use
• Unprecedented insights now possible with all 3.5 TB of daily data centralized in one place

Unleash your own ambitious future 

These stories are just the beginning of how premier organizations across industries are moving to Snowflake to drive competitive advantage. 

Download the book “Secrets of Snowflake Migration Success” to hear stories from more leaders about how moving to Snowflake helped them slash costs, reduce complexity and make their gen AI goals a reality.