Customer advocacy is one of the Snowflake Support team’s most important roles. Working closely with customers around the world every day, we listen and learn to gain meaningful insights into Snowflake products, the ways our customers use those products, and the challenges they face. We feel a deep responsibility to take those insights and trends, analyze them, and drive positive change on behalf of Snowflake customers.
The skyrocketing value of data has created a global supply and demand for data, data applications, and data services. This new data economy is powered by technologies that enable data access and sharing, including cloud platforms, exchanges, and marketplaces.
Since I joined Snowflake, I have been asked multiple times what data warehouse modeling approach Snowflake best supports. Well, the cool thing is that Snowflake supports multiple data modeling approaches equally. Turns out we have a few customers who have existing data warehouses built using a particular approach known as the Data Vault modeling approach, and they have decided to move into Snowflake. So the conversation often goes like this.
In March, Snowflake continued to enhance its capabilities around data programmability and data pipeline development, with the Snowpark API and stored procedures for Java now in public preview, schema detection now generally available, and the Snowflake SQL API generally available. In addition, Snowflake’s user interface, Snowsight, is generally available. Not to mention an expanded selection of new partners to choose from in Snowflake Data Marketplace.
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.
