Velir & BDC: A Data Dream at Snowflake Summit 2023
I attended my first Snowflake Summit with my Velir and Brooklyn Data Co. (a Velir Company) colleagues at the end of June. I like to think I’m a conference connoisseur since I average eight or more conferences a year, but let me tell you, I was blown away by this event in Las Vegas.
Snowflake is a cloud-computing-based data cloud company founded in 2012. They easily enable governed access to near-infinite amounts of data, and cutting-edge tools, applications, and services. Their conference brought together over 12,000 data professionals ranging from practitioners, data engineers, executives, partners, and more. Snowflake convened this group to share insights into the latest trends and technologies that can help organizations maximize their data and the modern data stack.
Before diving into event specifics, I want to reflect on the event’s sheer size. In all my years attending conferences, this was hands down the largest event I’ve attended. Since Snowflake was only founded 11 years ago, the fact that they were able to attract over 12,000 attendees is a testament to the increasing focus on data across all industries. Data is knowledge, so business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) organizations now understand how data and the insights it provides can transform your customer experiences. That’s why organizations are prioritizing clean data, visualization, and data-driven digital marketing more than ever.
Now onto the content of Snowflake Summit. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days, so it was great to start the event with a keynote about AI’s impact on data innovation from Snowflake’s Frank Slootman and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang. With plans to bring generative AI to enterprises, Snowflake can now help organizations estimate various insights, such as predictive forecasting of pipeline marketing. The keynote reiterated the conference theme and it’s true — there are no limits on data.
Day Two was another busy and exciting day with Brooklyn Data Co.’s Will Wood, Director of Data & Analytics presenting at the Sigma booth about embedded data capabilities. During his presentation, Will showed real-life examples of data dashboards and visualizations in the healthcare space, demonstrating how having data at your fingertips and the ability to filter or sort it can guide informed business decisions across your organization. Will also co-lead another session with one of Brooklyn Data Co.'s clients, Vetsource, on centralizing data from multiple entities in Snowflake. It was exciting to see Will and Jared share a Brooklyn Data Co. and Snowflake partner success story and discuss the positive impacts the collaboration has had on their business.
I could regale you with more details of the remaining days of the conference, but I'll summarize: it was busy, insightful, invigorating, and inspiring.
An overarching theme from the conference was how Snowflake has evolved from its roots as a data warehouse. When talking to Velir’s VP of Data Activation, Adam Ribaudo, he noted “Snowflake’s compute infrastructure can hold data, run AI pipelines, and serve visualizations as well. Then you put the marketplace on top of all that and anything you build on Snowflake can be sold to others so they can access your code and/or data securely from their Snowflake instance.”
Data is truly driving change across all industries, and as a data-driven agency, it’s exciting to hear about how the Snowflake marketplace provides easy access to third-party data sets. With the Snowflake marketplace, any of our clients on Shopify can click a button and have analytics so they can compare their performance to other stores. In other industries, our clients can monetize or otherwise use Snowflake to share their data. With our nonprofit and association clients that research and collect proprietary data on various issues they focus on, this is a novel channel to increase their data’s reach.
Snowflake Summit 2023 was a great event demonstrating data's power and highlighting data's growing role in creating amazing customer experiences. With that power comes great responsibility so please don’t hesitate to reach out to the Velir and Brooklyn Data Co. teams to set up a call if you’d like to chat about Snowflake, personalization, digital experience platforms, or more!