Exclusive Interview: Is Snowflake’s data warehousing what ANZ needs?

The role that data plays in achieving business outcomes is growing at an exponential rate and the number of solutions to tackle the challenges of storing of this data are growing almost as fast.

Snowflake saw the need for a more powerful and flexible data warehousing solution and looked at how it could leverage the cloud to achieve this lofty goal.

Snowflake Asia Pacific and Japan alliances director Guy Baldwin explains how they are approaching the ANZ channel and outlines some of the issues that partners and users face when approaching the storage and management of data.

"2018 is all about putting in a strong Australia and New Zealand partner ecosystem to support our key customer use cases," Baldwin says, then outlining the four main customer use cases on which Snowflake is focusing:

• Moving past cloud database limitations of scale, concurrency and support for increasing amounts of unstructured data.
• Migrating from limited on-premise data warehouses into the cloud.
• Simplifying big data complexity with a SaaS solution that requires no software stack to certify, provision, and a single, ANSI ACID-compliant SQL environment for both structured and semi-structured data.
• Medium-sized businesses looking for a pay as you go solution.

"We're looking for all solution partners to have certified Snowflake resources, delighted customers and growing profitable Snowflake practices," he adds.

Data silos and lock-in can become a serious issue when users approach data storage without a strategy in place and Baldwin outlines how Snowflake can help organisations avoid this issue.

"Snowflake is designed to support all business data. Customers can simplify their data architecture with Snowflake, consolidating multiple data platforms and data marts into a scalable data warehouse based on the standard SQL known to millions of users and business intelligence tools.

"With Snowflake's recently announced Data Sharehouse, enterprises can enable data sharing to unite data silos and acquire a single source of truth by sharing between hundreds of data silos across dozens of business units within a single enterprise.

And, as is vital in the face of today's threat landscape, security is also a priority in the offerings.

"Snowflake follows best-in-class, standards-based practices to ensure their customers' data and data warehouse security," Baldwin says.

"Snowflake works with AICPA-certified, third-party auditors to maintain security compliance and attestations including SOC 2, Type II. We're also PCI DSS certified, FedRamp Ready and HIPAA compliant.

To enable reseller and service provider partners, they will be provided with training, as well as sales and technical support, including an online Cloud Analytics Academy, a technical reference library, specialist support, joint marketing programs, paid POCs (proof of concepts) and referral fees.

"Most importantly," Baldwin says, "our partners get to delight customers one query at a time and deliver a customer RoI of 604% with a payback period of fewer than three months (Forrester Consulting)."