Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

2021 is the year of the Data Cloud. Powered by the Snowflake platform, the Data Cloud will be the place where organizations across industries can converge to mobilize their data. Snowflake estimates that there are still hundreds of millions of data sets isolated in cloud data storage and on-premises data centers globally. The Data Cloud eliminates these silos, allowing you to seamlessly unify, analyze, and share your data to reach deeper insights and even open new revenue streams.

Powered by advances in machine learning, marketing analytics delivers more bottom-line impact with each passing year. It enables organizations to improve the targeting of ads and other content, optimize their ad spend through advanced marketing attribution, increase customer lifetime value, reduce churn, and more. While technology is making granular targeting and measurement possible, marketers are also doubling down on measures to ensure consumer privacy and data governance in their initiatives.

Snowflake met with Mark Stange-Tregear, Vice President of Analytics for Rakuten Rewards, and Andrew Parry, Vice President of IT Application Development for Office Depot, at Data Cloud Summit 2020. The Data Cloud is unlocking new ways of delivering products and services to customers, managing supply chains, and collaborating globally. Rakuten Rewards and Office Depot are going “all- in” on the Snowflake Data Cloud to transform their businesses. Q. How does data affect your business?

The world is rich with publicly available data sets that can provide immense value to businesses, in areas as diverse as economics, health, agriculture and transportation. But the data is highly fragmented, stored in different formats and databases around the world, making it very hard for businesses to consume and monetize.

Snowflake is delighted to share the findings of a new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study that examines the potential return on investment for organizations that procure Snowflake through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace and then use Snowflake as a core part of your application’s architecture. We commissioned the study in partnership with AWS.

This is the 3rd blog in our series on Snowflake Resource Optimization. In parts 1 and 2 of this blog series, we showed you how Snowflake’s unique architecture allows for a virtually unlimited number of compute resources to be accessed near-instantaneously. We also provided best practices for administering these compute resources to optimize performance and reduce credit consumption.

Public preview of the data lake export feature is now available. Snowflake announced a private preview of data lake export at the Snowflake virtual summit in June 2020. Data lake export is one of the key features of the data lake workload in the Snowflake Data Cloud. The feature makes Snowflake data accessible to the external data lake, and it enables customers to take advantage of Snowflake’s reliable and performant processing capabilities.

Data engineers love to use SQL to solve all kinds of data problems. For this and more, Snowflake is a perfect partner. Snowflake’s support for standard SQL and several SQL variations, combined with JavaScript stored procedures, has helped me solve complex data challenges. But sometimes you might have the need for custom code.

Snowflake connected with Margaret Sherman of Sonos at Data Cloud Summit 2020 to hear how the company is using the Data Cloud to understand customer preferences and enhance listening experiences. In a world where people are surrounded by a lot of noise, purity of sound in music and other content we seek out in the comfort of our homes can offer a welcome respite. There are lessons to be learned from a company reinventing home audio for today and tomorrow—and using the Data Cloud to do it.

Last year, Gartner declared that on-premises databases are now legacy technology. Are we ready to say the same for analytics and BI?