Both businesses and governments have been forced to respond to the global pandemic by developing interactive user experiences and spatial applications using location-based data sets to visualize COVID cases, communicate confinement measures, and track vaccine rollout progress.

Traditionally, CFOs focus on cost and cost control when managing the financial actions of a company. “Value” is assessed by putting a quantifiable number behind everything. It’s time to shift that mindset and take into account a different kind of value—the kind you can derive from an investment. Rather than worrying solely about the bottom line, ask the question: If you spend more today, what will you end up creating tomorrow?

A proverb from the Democratic Republic of the Congo says, “A good chief is like a forest: Everyone can go there and get something.” And, a Chief Data Officer is no exception. According to Forrester Research published in January 2021, data leaders today face a broad mandate as the role has expanded over the years. In the early years, CDOs mostly reported to technology leaders.

Not a day goes by without questions from candidates, customers, and other interested parties about how we run Snowflake Engineering. I often hear: “Snowflake has been delivering a truly innovative, high quality product, and the pace of delivery is only accelerating. There must be a secret to it.” Indeed, we have a unique engineering team, and continue to hire world-class engineers. They are the driving force behind our products.

At Snowflake Summit 2021, we announced that Snowpark and Java functions were starting to roll out to customers. Today we’re happy to announce that these features are available in preview to all customers on AWS today. These features represent a major new foray into data programmability, enabling you to more easily make Snowflake’s platform do more for you. Snowflake started its journey to the Data Cloud by completely rethinking the world of data warehousing to accommodate big data.