Big data has been revolutionizing the digital marketing landscape: organizations are gathering data from numerous sources; data streams are being collected at unparalleled speeds; and businesses are dealing with a variety of data structures, from emails to user behaviors to financial transactions.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen incredible growth in the number of data apps being built on Snowflake, including large customer-facing apps from companies such as BlackRock, Instacart, Lacework, and others. We’re proud of the fact that our platform helps developers bring these applications to life faster, scale better, and provide more powerful insights to their users, whether they be employees, partners, or customers.

Organizations trust Snowflake with their sensitive data, such as their customers’ personal information. Ensuring that this information is governed properly is critical. First, organizations must know what data they have, where it is, and who has access to it. Data classification helps organizations solve this challenge.

Today’s applications run on data. Customers value applications not only for the functionality they provide, but also for the data itself. It may sound obvious, but without data, apps would provide little to no value for customers. And the data contained in these applications can often provide value beyond what the app itself delivers. This begs the question: Could your customers be getting more value out of your application data?

We recently wrote about the interest we’re seeing in connected applications that are built on Snowflake. Connected applications separate code and data such that the app provider creates and maintains the application code, while their customers manage their own data and provide their data platform for processing the application’s data. Some of our partners choose the connected application model because it has benefits for both customers and application providers.

Following the recent GA of Snowpark for our customers on AWS, we’re happy to announce that Snowpark Scala stored procedures are now available in preview to all customers on all clouds. Snowpark provides a language-integrated way to build and run data pipelines using powerful abstractions like DataFrames. With Snowpark, you write a client-side program to describe the pipeline you want to run, and all of the heavy lifting is pushed right into Snowflake’s elastic compute engine.

Piano is a leading provider of software and services that help organizations better understand their audiences across digital channels. With these insights in hand, Piano customers can intelligently serve audiences with personalized experiences that keep them engaged and drive revenue, all through a single unified platform.

Here’s a scenario that might feel painfully familiar. Your marketing department captures customer leads, and passes them to the sales department. Marketing’s success is measured in part on the number and size of deals that result. But a squabble breaks out over how the sales department handles, nurtures, and attributes those conversions. Result: Neither department really wants to share their data.

In the past, data leaders had to manage a balancing act between data access and governance. Granting too much access meant opening up the business—and the privacy of consumers—to risk. But if you hold back data, you can’t deliver great experiences and value to customers. The Snowflake Media Data Cloud empowers companies to let go of the balancing act. They now have a single platform to store, govern, and share data while maintaining strict data governance.

Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Snowpark API for Scala and Java UDFs on AWS. Snowpark is the developer framework for Snowflake, bringing deep, language-integrated data programmability to users in the languages they love. At its core, Snowpark is all about extensibility.