The only certainty in today’s world is change. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the way organizations consume data. A typical company might have thousands of analysts and business users accessing dashboards daily, hundreds of data scientists building and training models, and a large team of data engineers designing and running data pipelines. Each of these workloads has distinct compute and storage needs, and those needs can change significantly from hour to hour and day to day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed nearly everything. It’s affected nearly all Americans, and as such, it’s impacted every organization they interact with, both B2C and B2B. One industry that has had its operations turned upside down is the grocery industry. Grocery stores and their consumer packaged goods (CPG) suppliers and partners had to improvise and adapt nearly overnight to accommodate the changing demands of shoppers.
Customers of B2B companies rely on insights from applications to grow their business, secure their infrastructure, make business decisions, and more. Unless your B2B company offers a rich set of analytics within its product, your customers likely demand nightly data dumps from your application so they can analyze application data with their own BI stack.
Virtually every marketing organization is taking steps to become more data-driven, but there are considerable gaps between vision and reality. According to a 2018 Salesforce report, only 47% of marketers have a completely unified view of customer data sources. Meanwhile, customer data complexity is only increasing. According to Salesforce’s 2020 “State of Marketing” study, the median number of data sources leveraged by marketers is projected to jump by 50% between 2019 and 2021.
Since Snowflake announced general availability on Azure in November 2018, increasing numbers of customers are deploying their Snowflake accounts on Azure, and with this, more customers are using Power BI as the data visualization and analysis layer. As a result of these trends, customers want to understand the best practices for a successful deployment of Power BI with Snowflake.
