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Once upon a time, the retail calendar centered itself on the Christmas season. Now, the retail surge is year-round. Not just the wave of traditional seasonal holidays from Valentine’s Day to the 4th of July, but also newer sales holidays, such as Cyber Monday, or even holidays created by some gigantic companies themselves, like Amazon’s Prime Day. Now, instead of a steady pace leading up to a frenzied December, retailers are in sprint mode all the time.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of the unstructured data management functionality in Snowflake. We launched public preview of this functionality in September 2021, and since then we have seen adoption by customers across industries for a variety of use cases. These use cases include storing and securing call center recordings, securely sharing PDF documents in Snowflake Data Marketplace, storing medical images and extracting data from them, and many more.

In 2022, retailers are still dealing with the lasting impacts of the global pandemic, including a decreased workforce, supply chain disruptions, and surging inflation. At the same time, now is the chance for a “long overdue great retail reset” that could promote stability and profitability, according to a recent Deloitte report.

Today’s organizations want stronger alignment between the cost of SaaS solutions and the value derived from these products. As a result, many software companies are looking at adopting consumption-based pricing models as an alternative to subscription models. With consumption-based models, customers only pay for what they use, and usage is tied directly to the value customers derive. Of course, consumption means software companies don’t experience revenue until customers use the solution.

We are excited to announce the integration of Tecton’s enterprise feature store and Feast, the popular open source feature store, with Snowflake. The integration, available in preview to all Snowflake customers on AWS, will enable data teams to securely and reliably store, process, and manage the complete lifecycle of machine learning (ML) features for production in Snowflake. Tecton allows data teams to define features as code using Python and SQL.

A new study from McKinsey warns that profit pools in the healthcare industry are likely to be flat due to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this stagnancy, the study identifies a number of opportunities for innovation in the industry.

Barcelona based PromoFarma by DocMorris is an e-commerce marketplace which groups together the health, beauty and personal products catalogues from more than 1,000 pharmacies and other sellers into one single website.

February brought a number of exciting enhancements, especially for customers building and running data pipelines in Snowflake, including support for Snowpark stored procedures and flexible task execution. Additionally, customers get improved impact analysis through support for object dependencies, and we continue to expand Snowflake’s global reach with the regional availability of UAE North (Dubai) on Azure. Read on for more!

Snowflake is proud to announce the open source release of SansShell, a non-interactive local host management agent. Its purpose is to enable strong authentication, authorization, and auditing of the management of servers of any type. The source code is available on GitHub.

Marcel Naumann, Senior Engineer Investment at NN Investment Partners, sees a future where fluid, easily accessible data and insights help portfolio managers achieve returns while investing in a responsible manner. We spoke with Naumann to learn how he’s making this future a reality with the Snowflake Data Cloud. NN Investment Partners (NN IP) manages assets for investors across 37 nations.