Summary: In this episode of The Data Possible Podcast, Vince Trotta, Head of Data Marketplace Deal Strategy at Snowflake, discusses the growing importance of data and how Snowflake’s Data Cloud—a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance—can help firms and professionals achieve their goals. In this episode, you will learn:

• Why it’s important to try data before you buy
• What data monetization is and what trends are being seen
• How data providers and data consumers can discover and reach new markets with Snowflake Data Marketplace
• How Snowflake unlocks and maximizes value

Resources: Discovery Data | Snowflake

The Data Possible Podcast is produced by our partner, Advisorpedia.

Podcast Transcription:

Doug: Hello, and welcome to The Data Possible Podcast presented by Discovery Data. This is your host, Doug Heikkinen. Modern data sharing is growing every year as data volumes continue to grow exponentially. Data is the new currency, or every company is a data company, may sound like clichés, but in today's hyper-competitive and global marketplace, possessing timely and relevant business data is often the difference between success and failure. Today, we're joined by Snowflake’s Vince Trotta, who was there at the formation of this data company, and currently leads deal strategy and partnerships for the firm. Welcome, Vince.

Vince: Hey, Doug, thanks for having me.

Doug: We're super happy to have an entire podcast about data on The Data Possible Podcast. Let's begin with who is Snowflake and what is the Snowflake Data Marketplace?

Vince: Sure, you bet. So Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud, the best way to think about it is, it's a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize their data. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds. Look at Snowflake as the platform and the engine that powers and provides access to the data cloud. Our origins, however, are as a proper relational database, built on all new code from the ground up and native to the cloud. Might not sound game changing today but back in 2014, I can assure you that there were a number of people that were having a hard time getting their head around that. At that time, we made a deliberate decision to position ourselves as a data warehousing solution that combined the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud, and sold that offering at a fraction of the cost on premises data warehouses. Marketplace was a pivot for Snowflake at the time, probably back in 2017, 2018, from Snowflake selling the value and virtues of a product capability called data sharing, which is what the marketplace is actually built on, and to move towards business value selling and creation of the marketplace that took all the friction out of making data available to consumers and making it easier for data providers to make that data available. So we replace things like API's, FTPs, copying data in the blob storage, etc.

Doug: What are the benefits of accessing data through Snowflake versus traditional data feed methods?

Vince: Yeah, so there are many, and I briefly touched on them just a moment ago. When you think about what the world looked like prior to Snowflake, the methods for which making data available were very, very dated, specifically, FTP, APIs, most recently copying data into blob storage. But there's a lot of different ways that are crude and rude relative to making data available. So if you want to think about it from the sense of there's really two different types of constituents that would be involved inside of the marketplace. First, let's look at it from a provider perspective. So just think a traditional data provider such as Discovery Data. When they need to get data to their clients, whether it be a new client, or whether it be more data to an existing client, a key thing is to take the friction out of that data delivery. So the Data Marketplace takes all that friction out of the data delivery by leveraging the feature set that I mentioned earlier, which is Snowflake data sharing. From a consumer perspective, their user experience is much better than dealing with legacy methods that I mentioned before, APIs, FTPs, etc., because now the consumer is able to have live access to the data without copying the data or moving the data. And they also have the benefit of bringing their first party data to the third party data in order to do real-time analytics. Then the last thing I'll say is from a security and compliance and governance perspective, this methodology, data sharing, brought to you by the Data Marketplace is the most GDPR CC compliant way of making data available. So everyone benefits by being part of the marketplace. Both the providers, the consumers, and the kind of the back-office operations people that have to govern what tools are brought into a firm.

Doug: Let's talk about the notion of trying data before you buy it. Is that important? And if so, why?

Vince: From what our clients tell us it's super important, right? And it aligns and how we do it and how we make it available really aligns to our customer values which is put the customer first. What clients want very simply is they want things to be easy. Try before you buy makes it easy not only to get access to the data, but to marry the data with their first party, this is usually beneficial. In addition try before you buy eliminates the back and forth between the provider and the consumer - files are always up to date, clients benefit from faster time to value, and when you talk to a lot of clients, specifically during the due diligence of trying to bring on a new data provider, there's a lot of times they'll get involved with contract clawbacks and when a contract clawback is, is that the client was licensed the data but wasn't able to get value from the data right out of the gate, because they were dealing with actually receiving the data. And we eliminate that because the data is available pretty much right there once the contracts are signed. So try before you buy enables that entire procurement workflow in a much more seamless fashion.

Doug: What's the concept of data monetization?

Vince: Very, very interesting question, at least for me. So I'm a little bit older, and I've been around for a while. And you know, it's very reminiscent of back in 2013, 2014 when you're talking to folks, IT folks specifically, about cloud computing, it was my experience back then if you asked 10 people what cloud computing was, you got 11 different answers. And I think data monetization is similar in a sense that you're going to get a lot of different answers, depending on who you talk to. For me, I look at it very simply, as number one, traditional data providers and data services providers have an opportunity to take advantage of modern technology to create operational efficiencies focused on lower cogs, higher margins, and a better user experience for their customers, resulting in upsell and cross sell opportunities. The second way is how a company can expand from their core competencies, a homebuilder, a trucking company and airlines, etc., into the arena of selling their data to a third party.

Doug: What are some of the trends you're seeing with data monetization?

Vince: So general trends, I just read an interesting article from IDC the other day, I think it was 95% of organizations will digitally consume some form of outside data by 2023. And access to the right data at the right time is still an area where more organizations are struggling. In another study that I read, 400+ companies in 34 or 35 different countries, only 1 in 12 were fully monetizing their data. This means that the data is still outstripping the demand and many organizations that can potentially be accessing data providers may not fully be aware of the digital gold they possess on which tools or technologies they need to bring to the market. Some of the trends we’re seeing specifically to Snowflake, data as a service and data enrichment where the sharing of the data starts with the consumer and makes their data available to an enrichment service is super interesting. So I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re in the marketing department and you’re getting ready to run an email campaign and you’re paying for the number of emails that’ll eventually go out the door so making sure you target Vince Trotta is super important. I may have 4 or 5 different aliases right, so you want to narrow it down to 1 or 2 aliases that you know will get to me so that I can take an appropriate action. So a simple enrichment service that you can get and one of the trends we’re seeing is the marketing department at the firm that’s getting ready to run that email campaign will make their database of emails available via Snowflake to a company that does email enrichment. They will enrich that database, find the right set of Vince Trotta emails, then make that enriched database back available to the marketing lead getting ready to run a program. So that's a pretty simple, straightforward one on data services and data enrichment which is very interesting and trending right now. Then there’s also the data cleanroom, and that’s a safe place that allows multiple companies or divisions of a single company to bring data together for joint analysis under defined guidelines and restrictions that keep the data secure. So data services, enrichment, and clean rooms are really popular right now.

Doug: Probably the most important question here is how can data providers or data consumers reach and discover new markets in the Snowflake data marketplace?

Vince: Easily is the short answer. The longer answer is, you're a data scientist or somebody that's focused on business intelligence, or analytics. Anyone who desires to make data-driven decision making across more than, I think we have more than 650 live and ready to query datasets from over 175 third party data providers. That's all available and right there at their fingertips from the Snowflake Data Marketplace. Discoverability is critical, in my opinion in any marketplace. And the dataset should be curated, placed in a very simple category like media, energy, travel, weather, etc. And it needs to be safe, secure, and actionable. Because those are the key ingredients to having a strong value prop from a marketplace perspective.

Doug: If you're not making data decisions, are you just kind of missing the boat?

Vince: I would say yes, for sure.

Doug: Yeah. How does Snowflake unlock and maximize value? And can you share an example or a case study for us?

Vince: Yeah, I think back to our values, right, always thinking about putting the company first, we have teams of people focused on reducing the friction, right. And when you think about any marketplace, can be Uber, could be Doordash, whatever the case may be bringing that two-sided marketplace is really focused on taking out the friction, and providing a great user experience. I can't name a specific company. But let's just say there's a large financial services organization located in the northeast United States, they're all in on the Snowflake Data Marketplace. And what I mean by all in is that they now require all of their data providers to have a presence in the Snowflake marketplace. That's where they want to go for their data. And they don't want to rely on legacy means and methods for receiving data. Like I mentioned, earlier APIs, FTPs, Blob Storage, etc. And in exchange for this, we have dedicated resources to this large financial services company up in the northeast, where we will provide both the business and the technical resources to onboard the data providers that they want to participate in our marketplace. So it's really a great win-win perspective, the provider gets the opportunity to market their goods and services to additional partners, and our existing clients that rely on the marketplace to receive their data get a turnkey solution and the human capital to support that initiative. So it's really fantastic. And we have over 5,000 customers with inside of the Snowflake and this is just a great value add, in addition to the other amazing things that we do for our customers.

Doug: Vince, it's been quite a pleasure. We thank you so much for joining us.

Vince: Yeah, you bet. You know, if data's your business, I encourage you to look at the Snowflake marketplace. If you're an existing Snowflake client, I encourage you to visit the marketplace and take some action and a ton of valuable data there. So happy searching.

Doug: Yeah, and you can visit that at Snowflake.com, correct?

Vince: You bet.