After rocking the cloud business with its market-shaking data cloud innovations, Snowflake is leveraging that momentum into the red-hot applications-development space by helping customers deploy and monetize data-intensive applications directly into Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
This feisty initiative is a perfect example of CEO Frank Slootman’s philosophy of always being on offense, and of relentlessly pushing breakthrough technologies into adjacent new markets.
Launched in June, the app-dev offensive is intended to give Snowflake’s fast-growing customer base — now totaling about 7,000 — additional reasons to pull more of their work and workloads into the Data Cloud and out of traditional data-management processes and tools.
At the launch of its app-dev program in June, Snowflake said its Snowflake Marketplace would become the connecting point for consumers to securely install and run those apps created and deployed by customers in the Snowflake Data Cloud.
That press release included this customer testimonial from Capital One:
“With Snowflake’s ability to build, distribute, and deploy applications natively in the Data Cloud, we will be able to quickly deliver value to customers,” said Salim Syed, VP, Slingshot Engineering for Capital One Software. “Following the launch of Capital One Slingshot, a data management solution for customers of Snowflake’s Data Cloud, we saw the potential of the Snowflake Native Applications Framework and the increased opportunity to reach more customers to help them optimize the efficiency of their Snowflake usage with the Slingshot app for Snowflake Marketplace.”
And recently, Snowflake connected me with two additional customers to share their impressions of Snowflake as an app-dev platform. Here are some highlights from those two customers.
Blue Yonder Senior VP of Product Development Chris Burchett
Blue Yonder makes supply-chain software, and Burchett said that as its customers have transformed to digital businesses and have revamped their supply chains, those customers found they needed to scale their forecasting capabilities by 10X.
“We were running 2.5 billion predictions per day on our systems, and we had to find a way to make that more efficient,” Burchett said. By running its applications in the Snowflake Data Cloud, Blue Yonder’s forecasting ability increased by 20X, he said.
“We’ve standardized our data platform on Snowflake, and we’re also building out future technology with Snowflake as our data lake,” Burchett said.
“We want Snowflake to be our single source of truth architecturally” for all reporting and transactions.
FactSet Executive VP of Content and Technology Solutions Jonathan Reeve
FactSet offers insights to 7,000 financial-services companies looking to optimize their decision-making around risk profiles and growth opportunities, Reeve said, but its ability to do so in a timely fashion was limited by outdated technology requiring transfer of FTP (file transfer protocol) files.
With Snowflake’s app-dev capabilities, FactSet can now share those insights and the related data directly within the Snowflake Data Cloud, Reeve said.
On top of that, Reeve said, FactSet’s work with Snowflake has given it the ability to help advise its customers on how to accelerate and optimize their own digital transformations, which has become a valuable differentiator in the market for FactSet.
“FactSet has been creating and delivering this type of high-value insight and data for more than 40 years,” Reeve said, “and in the last two years, the vast majority of our implementations have been cloud-native.
“And with all of our content available on Snowflake, it is literally available to our customers within moments.”
That has led to the creation of a new service FactSet can offer its customers as they brainstorm what they can do with their data. “They need to test those ideas and models, and now that we’re working with Snowflake, we can give them a POC very quickly and easily so they can try before they buy.”
As a result, Reeve said, FactSet’s conversations with its customers have shifted away from how to consume various data sets and are now focused on “the whole of their business, not just a technical part.
“And that is great for our relationships.”
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