How Data Providers Can Grow Their Business With Snowflake

Platforms like Snowflake are now an essential delivery channel — and growth partner — for data providers. Through its sharing protocol and data marketplace, Snowflake has emerged as an important way for companies to bring their data products to market. This playbook breaks down why providers are moving to work with the platform, and offers a step-by-step guide to building the technology and go-to-market infrastructure required to capitalize on the opportunity.

The fast track: what you need to know

Data teams that work in Snowflake want external data delivered via Sharing. Teams who operate in Snowflake want everything they do — from the models and dashboards they build to the data they ingest — built natively in Snowflake. That means many buyers are dropping SFTP or API-based delivery in favor of Snowflake's native sharing protocol.

Snowflake Sharing + Marketplace = a growth opportunity for providers. Snowflake is betting big on driving its customers to not only consume, but discover, external data on its platform. Providers are finding that supporting delivery on the platform and investing in its marketplace can help meet the demands of existing customers and find and close new buyers faster.

Capitalizing on Snowflake requires providers to modernize their delivery stack. If you do not already operate in Snowflake, sharing data to customers in the platform can be challenging. Cross-cloud sharing is highly complex and requires new technology to avoid burying your engineering teams in custom pipelines and technical debt. Data Sharing Platforms like Bobsled provide a simple way to stand up delivery in Snowflake (and other platforms) with limited upfront expense — delivery teams can share data via Snowflake without ever opening a Snowflake account or building a pipeline.

Snowflake is the new home for many buyers

Snowflake has quickly become the home for many modern data teams. What started as a cloud data warehouse now supports a host of workloads — from data science and modeling to data engineering and even security analytics. Today, the company is focused on enabling data teams to access every resource and service they need to succeed — from managed apps to external datasets — without ever leaving the platform.

These investments have made support for Snowflake sharing both a growing customer requirement and a growth opportunity for data providers. Customers who have moved to Snowflake now want data delivered natively into the platform; providers who meet that demand can begin to take advantage of the technology — and ecosystem — to grow their business. Companies across the Fortune 2000 use Snowflake, including big names in the external data market like Morgan Stanley, Mastercard and State Street.

Why data teams are demanding Snowflake delivery

Data delivered through a Snowflake share appears as a ready-to-query dataset natively in a data team's analytical environment. That means data teams can eliminate time-consuming and error-prone ETL pipelines from SFTP servers or APIs and focus their time on analysis.

Snowflake introduced its sharing protocol in 2017 and in recent years has made collaboration a core part of its growth strategy. Today, roughly one quarter of all Snowflake users either share or consume data via a share, and the company has made expanding the use of sharing a top priority.

Instead of delivering to an external location, providers use Snowflake's native sharing protocol to "share" read-only views of analytics-ready tables with their consumers. The consumer analyzes the data using their own compute while it remains stored in the provider's account. Data providers who operate within Snowflake can instantly share (and revoke) analytics-ready views of their core data products with customers — so customers can get started analyzing a new data product in minutes, not days, with very little additional investment.

Benefits of Snowflake Sharing for consumers

• No "extract and load" pipelines to manage. A Snowflake share appears natively in a customer's environment — no extracting data from an SFTP server or bulk API and then loading it in.
• Limited transformation to get data "analytics ready." Snowflake shares deliver analytics-ready tables directly into the customer's analytics environment — no need to integrate files from cloud storage.
• Data is refreshed in real time. Because data is accessed from the source, changes in the source data appear in the customer's dataset in real time — no updates to manage.

3 steps to delivering data (and growing your business) on Snowflake

The value of delivering data on Snowflake is clear: happier customers, faster trials and access to a new set of prospects on the marketplace. Getting there can be challenging without the right technology.

1. Create the business case for Snowflake delivery

First, identify how Snowflake can help grow your business. There's a good chance your existing customers and prospects use Snowflake, but it's critical to build the business case first. Do your research so you understand the key concepts. Ask your account reps and sales teams which existing customers and prospects have requested native delivery — and which host their data on Snowflake and could benefit from it. Look through the Snowflake Marketplace to see whether your competitors appear; if they do, there's a good chance they are finding customers in the channel.

2. Build the delivery infrastructure

Now it's time to scope a delivery plan. Providers need an approach to Snowflake that scales across users and makes moving to the next platform easier. In order to share in Snowflake, the data products must live in Snowflake. For providers who already operate in Snowflake, supporting shares is relatively straightforward; for those on another platform, it can mean managing Snowflake infrastructure just to fulfill deliveries. Based on existing customer demand, identify the 1–3 products you plan to share via Snowflake, start with a private listing for each so you only deliver to customers you choose, and deploy direct shares to existing customers.

3. Grow on Snowflake (and elsewhere)

The Snowflake Marketplace is a powerful go-to-market engine — a channel (and partner) for new demand generation. According to Snowflake, public listings with "instant access" datasets drive 41% more leads than ones without. When you build a public listing, remember the individuals searching are not necessarily your traditional customer, so make sure you have a comprehensive data dictionary, give prospects a way to see the data without a sales process, and share sample queries to help them understand its value. Snowflake is a critical part of the modern data stack — but there's no single winner. Succeeding on Snowflake is a great place to start building a broader cloud sharing program.

Build vs. buy: how a data sharing platform like Bobsled can help

Data sharing platforms are a new but important part of the modern delivery stack for data-as-a-service companies. They let companies share data products across any major cloud or platform from a single control plane, without opening an account in the destination. They're particularly important for providers who don't currently operate in Snowflake, or who intend to share data with customers on other platforms too.

• Deliver in Snowflake in minutes, from anywhere. Supporting delivery into Snowflake can take 3–6 months and substantial investment if you don't already operate on the platform. With Bobsled, providers can deliver in minutes — and only pay when they actively share data with customers.
• Zero domain expertise required. All you need to know is your customer's public identifier. No account to open, bill to manage, or experts to hire to build a pipeline.
• See your entire delivery footprint in one place. Bobsled provides a single control plane from which you can initiate, track and optimize shares into every major cloud storage platform and data warehouse.