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What is Data Sharing, Anyways? Why is it Cool? And how is it Re-Shaping how we Interact with Data?

There’s been a flurry about Snowflake in the marketplace. The purpose of this blog is to provide an overview of Snowflake, to describe how it’s changing the way we think about modern analytics, and to highlight the strides that Apps Associates is taking alongside Snowflake as a premier partner.

Snowflake and Apps Associates

Overview

At its core, Snowflake has revolutionized how businesses think about data sharing. Built-for-the-cloud, it combines: 1) the power of data warehousing 2) the flexibility of big data platforms, 3) the elasticity of the cloud, and 4) the accessibility of live data sharing.

Based on a unique cloud architecture, enterprises can easily and quickly create relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many) to share data in unprecedented and imaginative ways while driving new business insight.

Why it’s Cool

1. One Location: performance, concurrency, and ease-of-use in a singular place. Develop a single source of truth for all of your data that simultaneously can be shared among endless data consumers across hundreds of business units within a single enterprise or externally.

2. Business First, Business Forward: share live data with business partners and across organizations to optimize decision-making, streamline operations, and provide superior customer satisfaction and support.

3. Pay for What You Use: Only pay for what you use with a zero management pay-as-you-go service and cut down on costs devoted to scaling and data sharing.

Should I Pay Attention?

Although there are many features and articles around what makes Snowflake unique, ultimately it provides the greatest inherent value to those in search of the following:

  • A solution for sharing data
  • The ability to access massive amounts of data
  • The ability to leverage data sharing to create new business opportunities
  • A scalable data warehouse that can operate as a platform for sharing data

Old World vs. New World of Data Sharing

Traditionally, the process to share data between organizations or between enterprises external to one another is cumbersome, slow, expensive, and only allows for the movement of limited amounts of data.

But what if you didn’t have to move data to enable the sharing of data? Instead of the traditional process -make a copy, send it, download it, combine the data, make sense of it, etc. – the data provider powered by a modern data sharing tool simply makes available live, read-only copies of the data to its data consumers.

With modern data sharing, the cloud enables the scalability, elasticity, and flexibility necessary to store data from diverse sources and share the data among a large number of data consumers without contention or competition for resources.

Benefits of Modern Data sharing

Perks of Starting Small, and With Focus

Taking Advantage of a Custom POC to Address a Specific Business Need

Taking advantage of a cloud-based data sharing platform doesn’t have to be a grand undertaking. Intentionally, Snowflake encourages customers to try and then buy with a “start small and grow as you love it” approach.

For Oracle and Salesforce customers, Apps Associates has furthered this approach by coupling the trial with our own version of a supercharged POC tailored to the ERP, HCM, or SCM solution. First, we work with a customer to define a specific business need where Snowflake can be leveraged. From there, we build an environment to showcase how data sharing can address the business need in a scalable, cost-efficient manner.

Lastly, leveraging our two decades of source data, we provide customers with an application-specific analytics framework based on pre-defined, commonly used metrics, dashboards, and reports. Business areas include:

  • Financials,
  • Human Resources & Recruitment
  • Procurement & Supplier Performance and Spend
  • Supply Chain & Order Management

Apps Associates can help you to get started by building a free Snowflake POC geared towards your business. Schedule time with our team to review the process and potential benefits.