Data Suppliers

A data supplier (or data vendor or data provider) is an organization or business that provides data for use of consumption by third parties. Some data suppliers provide access to data sets for free, some sell data for a cost and some data providers offer a mix of free and fee-based data services. 

While some data suppliers are solely in the business of data collecting, brokering, and selling, many third-party data sets available come from businesses or organizations that have decided to share or monetize data sets that arise from their normal business operations. Any business that produces data or metadata and is willing to share or sell this data outside the organization can become a data supplier. 

Organizations or businesses that buy or access third-party data are called data consumers or data buyers. Many businesses are both data suppliers and data consumers -- acquiring outside data to augment or enrich their existing data while sharing or selling their own data. Some businesses also barter data sharing as a zero-cost way to improve internal data analysis. 

A data marketplace or data exchange is required in order to facilitate seamless data sharing between interested parties -- whether freely offered, monetized, or bartered. With a data sharing platform, data consumers and data providers can increase ease of access and reduce exchange friction during data sharing transactions. 

Snowflake and Data Suppliers 

Snowflake Marketplace provides access to live, ready-to-query data that helps organizations unlock new insights in just a few short clicks. The platform gives business intelligence and analytics professionals, data scientists, and everyone who desires data-driven decision-making access to data from your ecosystem of business partners and customers, and from potentially thousands of data providers and data service providers. With Snowflake Marketplace, data providers and data consumers can source data faster, reduce analytics overhead, and monetize existing data sets.