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.

At this year’s Snowflake Data Cloud Summit: Data Together Now, customers and partners from around the world came together to explore the transformational power of data and Snowflake’s vision for bringing the world’s data together in the Data Cloud. Over the course of two days and 70 sessions, attendees were inspired by keynotes, learned from their peers in customer and partner sessions, and participated in hand-on labs and technical deep-dives.

Every marketer knows the old John Wanamaker quote, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” With the introduction and evolution of multi-touch attribution (MTA), the media industry has moved closer than ever to understanding the impact of each touchpoint on a customer’s behavior, from signing up for a newsletter to making a purchase.

Your data now resides in the cloud, and you’ve chosen SaaS providers that use their own products (or drink their own champagne, as I like to say). Does that mean you’re getting the full value from your data? No. Chances are high your data is still siloed. This time, the culprits are your SaaS providers who collect and store your data, thus limiting the analytics you can perform on it.

Today, technology drives organizations. We rely on it, which is why a misstep in selecting technology partners and their SaaS solutions can impact an organization in regrettable ways. It can impede your ability to scale in a graceful manner. It can slow down your journey of automation. It can even introduce risk related to compliance or security, depending on the solution. Whenever you decide to buy, a proper assessment of any SaaS provider is crucial.

Those who use data wisely have competitive advantages and more profits. As a result, companies are increasing their focus on improving their data literacy. For example, the importance of data has led companies like AppNexus1 and Chevron2 to conduct internal data science competitions to identify and hone analytical talent. But, as noted in the kickoff blog post to our series on data-driven organizations, merely having data does not ensure you have a useful interpretation of that data.

Since Snowflake’s inception we’ve had the needs of our customers as our North Star, with a clear focus on security and governance of data, continuous advances on performance and reduction of latencies, and relentless capabilities innovation. As part of our product development, we constantly evaluate where open standards, open formats, and open source can help or hinder our progress towards those goals. In short, it is a matter of degree.

The global pandemic continues to impact our world in so many ways. But it has also served as a catalyst for technological change—a forcing function that is accelerating cloud migration. Every company wants to create better products or services, differentiate offerings, price strategically, grab more market share, retain customers, and grow in a sustainable manner.