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Data platform vendor Snowflake and AWS have been laser focused on targeting partners together to help formulate their market stance in certain industry verticals.
At the Snowflake World Tour in Sydney, AWS director of category management Mona Chadha and Snowflake Australia and New Zealand director of channel and alliances Cathy Conroy discussed their long standing partnership that spans more than 28 integration across AWS services.
Specifically related to generative AI, Snowflake has integrations within Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock, giving customers choice on which large language models (LLM) they can use on Snowflake’s centralised data platform.
“We’re giving our customers a way to streamline their entire data strategy through Snowflake and AWS, giving them flexibility and interoperability,” Chadha said.
As the two organisations continue to build upon their partnership, Chadha said it has turned its focus towards bringing relevant industry solutions to customers around financial services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and transportation.
In order to achieve its specific industry play, Chadha said it was leveraging the partner network including data providers.
“We also have a joint list of global systems integrators that we work with like Deloitte and Accenture and regional system integrators,” she said.
“We’ve been able to pull in all those other partners in order to augment and deliver more extensible solutions for our end customers.”
As customers and partners alike are figuring out their play in the generative AI space, Conroy said it was tackling this opportunity across the customer front in saying there’s no AI strategy without a data strategy.
“We’re helping our customers get their data strategy under control, the sky’s the limit,” she said.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said the Snowflake platform allows customers to execute data strategies through a variety of architectures including collaborative lake houses, data mesh implementations and cloud data warehouses.
Along with partners, Ramaswamy said it was ringing in the era of enterprise AI and the Snowflake AI Data Cloud was delivering upon this in two ways – firstly through an AI-powered data platform that allows AI to intelligently ingest, govern and optimise data workflows and the second was focused on building advanced AI products.
“AI will change governance and power things like auto classification of data and auto generated metadata, making it easier to find and manage data,” he said.
“AI will also drive optimisation for queries and make them efficient without having to do any extra work and AI will simplify your data pipeline so that you’ll be able to extract structured data from unstructured data and get built in AI capabilities for any persona across your business.”
Setting a data vision
Bunnings CIO Genevieve Elliot shared the retail juggernauts’ data journey, revealing that it handles more than 500 million visits to digital channels, estimating 41 million visits per month across its various apps, online stores and community forums.
“When we started the journey, the Bunnings business knew that data would be really important, but we needed to frame it in a way that 55,000 team members could and would embrace,” she said.
“Our vision was that data would move seamlessly through our business so our team members had what they needed and that customers could get what they need and that it had to be safe, secure, well governed and have team members and customers at the heart of all the decisions we made.”
Elliot said much of its data plan had become a reality in the form of its enterprise data platform (EDP), which has Snowflake at its core, and that data is ready for use by lots of different teams around the business.
“EDP sits behind many of the experiences we offer customers today and we surfaced this information in a variety of different tools such as Power BI, Zebra apps, which staff have in their hands in store; data application, some of our core systems; dashboards; reporting tools and even Excel,” she said.
“Our intent is to give the best experience to customers and it was really important for us to capture customer data at scale and to ensure that we use it in a way that is accretive to our customers, so that we continue to be relevant and helpful.”
Elliot said with its investment in structured data, the Snowflake platform within EDP has been designed to integrate into many of the SaaS platforms that it already invested in and sets up Bunnings to be able to move ahead with generative AI initiatives at pace.
“With the investment that we’ve made and our growing maturity in data and analytics that we put in place several years ago and [with] our strategy, we’re feeling really confident and we know that our enterprise data fluency efforts will continue to grow,” she added.