Piano is a leading provider of software and services that help organizations better understand their audiences across digital channels. With these insights in hand, Piano customers can intelligently serve audiences with personalized experiences that keep them engaged and drive revenue, all through a single unified platform.

Here’s a scenario that might feel painfully familiar. Your marketing department captures customer leads, and passes them to the sales department. Marketing’s success is measured in part on the number and size of deals that result. But a squabble breaks out over how the sales department handles, nurtures, and attributes those conversions. Result: Neither department really wants to share their data.

In the past, data leaders had to manage a balancing act between data access and governance. Granting too much access meant opening up the business—and the privacy of consumers—to risk. But if you hold back data, you can’t deliver great experiences and value to customers. The Snowflake Media Data Cloud empowers companies to let go of the balancing act. They now have a single platform to store, govern, and share data while maintaining strict data governance.

Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Snowpark API for Scala and Java UDFs on AWS. Snowpark is the developer framework for Snowflake, bringing deep, language-integrated data programmability to users in the languages they love. At its core, Snowpark is all about extensibility.

The Snowflake Data Cloud is a powerful place to work with data because we have made it easy to do difficult things with data, such as breaking down data silos, safely sharing complex data sets, and querying massive amounts of data. As customers move to the Data Cloud, their needs and timelines vary—our goal is to meet every customer where they are on their Data Cloud journey.

Founded in 1934 as a postal and telephone betting service, William Hill was historically synonymous with the world of horse racing. Since then, the company has continued to grow into other sporting avenues, with the retail arm—which opened in 1966—now amounting to more than 1,400 shops. Fully embracing the potential of the digital revolution, the company now comprises over 10,000 employees over six brands, operating through offices in ten countries.

The final month of 2021 brought new capabilities for data governance, expanded insights for Snowflake Data Marketplace providers, and several new providers added to the Marketplace. For the full list, see the Release Notes.

When companies realized data was a resource and not just the by-product of sales, they began to offer customers additional value: free products, savings, money back, even a club-like exclusivity. They often did it, and still do it, with customer loyalty programs, which were frequently expressed in the form of a physical card, such as Starbucks Rewards and MyPanera. But the very biggest companies have changed the loyalty game.

With hundreds of SaaS products in a given company, it’s getting more and more challenging and time-consuming to manage supplier relationships and negotiate contracts. Vendr has completely transformed this entire process by creating a SaaS buying platform where stakeholders can easily handle the relationships and contracts of their different software suppliers in a centralized platform.

Out with the old; in with the new! If you haven’t already checked out the new Snowflake® interface (aka Snowsight®), make it your New Year’s resolution. Set yourself up for success in 2022 by spending a few minutes getting to know the new features and experiences that are in public preview—available when you click the Snowsight button at the top of your console’s menu bar.