Founded in 1934 as a postal and telephone betting service, William Hill was historically synonymous with the world of horse racing. Since then, the company has continued to grow into other sporting avenues, with the retail arm—which opened in 1966—now amounting to more than 1,400 shops. Fully embracing the potential of the digital revolution, the company now comprises over 10,000 employees over six brands, operating through offices in ten countries.

The final month of 2021 brought new capabilities for data governance, expanded insights for Snowflake Data Marketplace providers, and several new providers added to the Marketplace. For the full list, see the Release Notes.

When companies realized data was a resource and not just the by-product of sales, they began to offer customers additional value: free products, savings, money back, even a club-like exclusivity. They often did it, and still do it, with customer loyalty programs, which were frequently expressed in the form of a physical card, such as Starbucks Rewards and MyPanera. But the very biggest companies have changed the loyalty game.

With hundreds of SaaS products in a given company, it’s getting more and more challenging and time-consuming to manage supplier relationships and negotiate contracts. Vendr has completely transformed this entire process by creating a SaaS buying platform where stakeholders can easily handle the relationships and contracts of their different software suppliers in a centralized platform.

Out with the old; in with the new! If you haven’t already checked out the new Snowflake® interface (aka Snowsight®), make it your New Year’s resolution. Set yourself up for success in 2022 by spending a few minutes getting to know the new features and experiences that are in public preview—available when you click the Snowsight button at the top of your console’s menu bar.

Coming off of our Snowday event, we’ve unveiled a number of new product capabilities that expand what is possible in the Data Cloud. From helping businesses operate globally with improved replication efficiency, empowering developers with new functionality in Snowpark, and improving the security and governance of data through native object tagging, there is no shortage of exciting advancements coming to Snowflake.

Snowpark has generated significant excitement and interest since it was announced. Snowpark is a developer framework that enables data engineers, data scientists, and data developers to code in their language of choice, and execute pipelines, machine learning (ML) workflows, and data applications faster and more securely. While many parts of Snowpark are in preview stages, External Functions entered General Availability earlier this year.

Machine learning (ML) models have become key drivers in helping organizations reveal patterns and make predictions that drive value across the business. While extremely valuable, building and deploying these models remains in the hands of only a small subset of expert data scientists and engineers with deep programming and ML framework expertise.

At Snowflake, putting the customer first is an essential company value. But “customer-centric” is more than just a buzzword: We use a data-driven, outside-in lens on everything we do, at all levels of the company. In particular, here’s how Snowflake Support is listening to you—our customers—and continuously improving the Snowflake customer experience at every touchpoint.

At Singular, we have a pipeline that ingests data about ad views, ad clicks, and app installs from millions of mobile devices worldwide. This huge mass of data is aggregated on an hourly and daily basis. We enrich it with various marketing metrics and offer it to our customers to analyze their campaigns’ performance and see their ROI. The upshot is that we receive tens of thousands of events per second and handle dozens of terabytes of data every day, managing a data set of several petabytes.