Eutelsat Group Connects the World With 100% Faster Compute

From peacekeeping efforts and emergency response to transportation across land, sea and air, connectivity provides a vital backbone for many of the world’s most important services. But ensuring service connectivity reaches every corner is far from simple.

The Eutelsat Group is a world leading satellite provider, delivering connectivity in hard to reach areas for government and enterprise customers across the globe. In 2023, Eutelsat acquired  OneWeb, making it the only provider in the world that has both geostationary (GEO) and low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This combination provides even greater coverage for its clients, but also means greater data management challenges. 

OneWeb was already a long-term Snowflake user when Eutelsat acquired it. With low costs, seamless scalability and rapid time to insight, Eutelsat now plans to expand Snowflake’s use across the organization.

Keeping Eutelsat’s LEO satellites online requires storing, sharing and analyzing huge amounts of real-time data. The group takes measurements from its LEO satellite network every few milliseconds, creating 70 billion records a day. That’s multiple petabytes of data — all stored in Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

“Without such powerful compute and storage, it wouldn't be possible to be so reactive with all the data that we have to handle,” says Matteo Carucci, Head of Data and AI at Eutelsat. “With Snowflake, we’re able to manage, ingest and transform any volume of data from our satellites. That would be very difficult to do on any other platform.” 

In addition to its LEO data, Eutelsat ingests data from programs like Salesforce and SAP, and uses Apache Iceberg tables to bring its GEO data from a separate environment into Snowflake. This ensures all data from both Eutelsat and OneWeb resides in one place and is accessible by a single query, without the need for migration, data movement or duplication. The company’s data team then uses this central store of data to create data products for users across the organization. 

“We have Snowflake accounts for satellite data, ground networks, financials, CRM and so on,” says Carucci. “But we can also share data products between those accounts and combine data for more insight. These data products enable us to improve the services we provide to clients, and increase our ability to forecast and make business plans.They cover every aspect of the business.”

Snowflake’s constant development and release of new features provides Eutelsat with an opportunity to explore some of the latest innovations — all from the same place its data resides. 

“We can access really powerful capabilities like LLM models without having to export any data at all,” says Carucci. 

In particular, Snowflake’s Cortex AI and machine learning capabilities have given Eutelsat new opportunities to put its huge amounts of data to work. In one example, Eutelsat has been using AI to analyze its satellite data and forecast outages on the network, so customers experience minimal disruption. For a company that provides connectivity to vital use cases, like disaster recovery, aid and military operations, this ability to keep users online is paramount.

“LEO satellites move very quickly, so each customer is continually being handed over from one satellite to another,” says Carucci. “If we already know where outages are occurring, we can predict the impact and try and reroute customers earlier to avoid disruption." 

Eutelsat also uses sentiment analysis to prevent customer churn, analyzing and categorizing customer responses to different issues. Cortex Analyst, meanwhile, empowers Eutelsat’s users to explore data easily using natural language questions — which means its self-service capabilities can spread far beyond those with the technical knowledge to delve into data. 

“We ultimately want to give data access to everyone in the organization,” says Carucci. “We're really happy with the early results of Cortex Analyst, and we're looking forward to expanding the usage.”

Eutelsat’s exploration of new capabilities doesn’t end with AI. Among the new features the group has explored are Snowflake’s second-generation warehouses. Built on top of faster underlying hardware and enhanced software, these warehouses provide improved performance for analytics and data engineering workloads. The result is compute speeds that are between 20-100% faster than before — leading to rapid insights across the organization. 

To make sure the group gets the most from its Snowflake investment, Eutelsat partners with a dedicated Snowflake architect who helps upskill its internal teams, review data strategy and introduce and embed new features and functionality. 

Through various optimizations, this relationship has seen some significant results. Just six months in, Eutelsat experienced savings of over $2 million, while increasing its data workloads by 67%. Overall the company has seen a 40% reduction in compute costs in just one year.

Having seen firsthand the power of Snowflake, Eutelsat plans to expand its use of the platform, taking advantage of more features and functionality. 

Going forward, the group will experiment with Snowflake’s adaptive compute capabilities, where the platform automatically selects the right warehouse sizes and compute resources required for its workflows based on pre-defined costs. This will further reduce the administrative workload on Eutelsat’s data teams, and allow them to concentrate on exploring new use cases and adding value. Carucci estimates it will save the equivalent workload of one full-time employee. 

Eutelsat also intends to explore the potential of Openflow, an open and extensible data integration service that ingests data and transforms it into Snowflake visualizations. 

All of these capabilities, and more, will enable the group to keep doing what it does best — providing connectivity to those who need it, exactly where and when they need it.