Snowflake Accelerates Business Growth for Data, Apps and AI Products
Let’s say you are building a house that you plan to put up for sale. You focus on an amazing design, beautiful entry, large windows for plenty of sunlight — things that will create a delightful experience for your future buyer. At the same time, the house also needs less glamorous but vitally important infrastructure, like plumbing, running water, electricity, heating, cooling and so on. Unless you are providing a unique off-the-grid experience, home buyers want all of the main systems to be in place and working when they move in.
Providing SaaS applications is similar — everyone wants an attractive, easy-to-use app — but often the vital infrastructure is missing: Most SaaS products are delivered in an “empty” state. Customers need to move their data to the application and, additionally, may need to integrate it with other applications and data sources before the product can really deliver value. The way traditional SaaS applications are delivered slows down time to value and incurs additional costs for customers and providers.
When you build applications on Snowflake, you are building your product on the grid — quite literally, actually. Snowflake calls this Snowgrid, a cross-cloud technology layer that interconnects your application with more than 9,800 (as of April 2024) other organizations in the AI Data Cloud, facilitating live connections with your customers, partners and other third-party providers, no matter which cloud provider they are on. Snowgrid allows your application to run at global scale, integrated and connected, so you can deliver a product that’s ready for production when your customer arrives. Coming back to the house metaphor, it’s like flipping a switch to turn on the lights — or in our case, use data.
Want a practical example? Let’s say you provide SaaS products to financial services customers. More often than not, your application will not live in a silo but will need to access financial market data to work effectively. Traditionally, this required prebuilt integrations such as APIs or, for more bespoke feeds, ETL, secure FTP or custom APIs.
On Snowflake, that integration work is not necessary. Establishing a connection to live data is like switching on a light in a house connected to an energy grid — it just works.
In a recent episode of the “Data Cloud Podcast,” Duncan Angove, CEO at Blue Yonder, a leading technology solutions provider with an enterprise supply chain platform, elaborated on this topic. “Supply chain applications are very, very siloed,” he said. “You have different application topologies across the landscape, and they are all sitting on data silos. And you end up moving data around and doing transformations. There’s a lot of latency. There’s a lot of inefficiency. And because the volumes are so enormous here, you end up with a lot of batch. It means companies are not as agile as they should be. And that’s the fundamental thing — Snowflake allowed us to shatter that paradigm by almost creating a single database for the world’s supply chains to solve that problem at scale.”
In addition to providing underlying connectivity, Snowflake’s unique architecture allows organizations to build their products faster, scale with ease and distribute and deliver products securely across global regions. The primary focus of this blog, however, is not the technical benefits but how providers achieve accelerated business growth by delivering data, apps and AI products on Snowflake.