Snowflake is a highly popular data lake, which made headlines at Dreamforce ‘22, where their zero-copy architecture between Salesforce became a major differentiator. This means that Data Cloud can directly access data stored in Snowflake (and vice-versa) without moving or duplicating data.
Now, Salesforce and Snowflake are building on their existing partnership, by delivering Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) Data Sharing.
Salesforce Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL)
Salesforce have been clear about the importance of data in making GenAI work for your organization: AI models + data lakes = data harmonization and GenAI for your business workflows.
In order to be trained effectively, large language models (LLMs) require large amounts of data. Organizations with large repositories of data will use a data lake. While Salesforce has their own Data Cloud, the openness of their platform means that organizations can use their preferred data lake provider.
Data lakes allow organizations to store masses of data – both structured data (how integrated systems, like Salesforce, need it structured to work with it), and unstructured data.
A recent survey found 36% of CIO and IT decision-makers say integrating siloed apps and data is their biggest digital transformation challenge. Data lakes solve this by housing different data sets, and making them accessible to different platforms.
Traditionally, organizations would need to:
- Track and transform exported data from one system to another.
- Pay overheads for additional storage.
- Suffer a time lag between data changing, and that being reflected in integrated systems, such as your CRM – which made reacting swiftly to market changes a challenge.
With a Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) solution, you can combine customer data from Salesforce with external data stored in Snowflake.
Who is Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) For?
Data accessibility ultimately benefits everyone in the organization, however, there are some key beneficiaries of BYOL:
- Data scientists can build AI and machine learning models in Snowflake combined with Salesforce profiles, website visits, and POS data to unlock new insights.
- Marketers can enhance segmentation and personalize campaigns by merging CRM data in Salesforce with external data in Snowflake.
- Salespeople can integrate CRM data in Salesforce with external data Snowflake to use intelligent forecasting and performance analytics to optimize sales performance.
- Analysts can identify new trends and develop strategic insights by merging historical sales and contact data from Salesforce with web analytics data in Snowflake.
Summary
Snowflake has received investment attention, having raised $2B in total across seven rounds (their Series G round took place in February 2020) – and what’s noteworthy is that Salesforce Ventures was one of those investors.
When Salesforce launched Genie (now Data Cloud) it came with zero-data copy architecture, a special integration to directly access data stored in data lakes (and vice-versa) without moving or duplicating data. Salesforce partnered with Snowflake as their data lake provider of choice – and now, with BOYL, there’s more promising enhancements on the horizon.