Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder Bob Evans. The guest host of today’s episode is Aaron Back, who discusses Snowflake. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud.
This episode is sponsored by “Selling to the New Executive Buying Committee,” an Acceleration Economy Course designed to help vendors, partners, and buyers understand the shifting sands of how mid-market and enterprise CXOs are making purchase decisions to modernize technology.
In this Cloud Wars Minute, Aaron explains how Capital One’s latest Slingshot product — built on Snowflake technology — assists with cost governance.
Highlights
00:29 — The lines are increasingly blurring as customers are creating their own B2B solutions based on platforms offered by cloud vendors. One company that’s jumped into this, explains Aaron, is Capital One, a brand known for its banking services. Capital One just created a data management solution called Slingshot.
01:08 — The intent of Slingshot is to provide customers with the means to “be self-service in the way they manage their data.” Something the company is “pushing hard on” is cost governance. In this instance, “it’s all the consumption costs that go into using that data and the compute power, and a lot of these data cloud providers.” Capital One is using this solution internally to manage and self-serve and understand its cost governance.
02:02 — The Slingshot solution is built on top of Snowflake technology. Not only has Snowflake assisted Capital One with its internal development and use of Slingshot, but it has also enabled them to package up the solution and deliver it to customers. Currently, Slingshot is running “about two billion queries” with nearly 7,000 active users. Overall, the product intends to provide a forecast of potential data consumption costs.
03:06 — This type of collaboration between a vendor and customer is quite interesting, suggests Aaron. “It’s interesting, what Capital One has done here, is to create sort of this niche to really manage this cost governance.”
04:28 — Aaron acknowledges the use cases of Slingshot delivering a product that addresses customer needs relating to cost governance.
