Last week I attended my first Snowflake Summit for Brooklyn Data Co (a Velir Company). It was a hot week in Las Vegas filled with sunshine, slot machines, booth duty, happy hours, meetings, and more! This was by far the largest conference I’ve attended to date. Snowflake Summit is a gathering of over 12,000 data professionals ranging from practitioners, data engineers, executives, partners, and more. Snowflake brought this group together to share insights into the latest trends and technologies that can help organizations maximize their use of data and the modern data stack.
I started out the week with Partner Summit, hearing from Colleen Kapase, Chris Degnan, Krishnan Parasuraman, and Denise Perrson. Snowflake is truly a partner-first organization, so it was great to learn about the ways partners like Brooklyn Data and Snowflake can work and grow together.
I also loved seeing some of our favorite partners win partner network awards. Congrats to dbt, Sigma, and Hex on these great achievements! After hearing an amazing keynote about AI’s impact on data innovation from Snowflake’s Frank Slootman and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, I went to our booth where it was easy to sense the excitement as we began the biggest data event of the year. I rounded out Day One of the Summit at our Low Key Data Happy Hour which we hosted with our partners Portable, Metaplane, Rudderstack, Striim, and DataGalaxy at Beer Park. We had over 600 of our closest friends join us there!
Day Two kicked off our time meeting people at our booth and giving away thousands of t-shirts. I spoke to Snowflake customers of all different industries and sizes. It was great to hear first hand how working with a Snowflake partner can drastically help the migration from a legacy infrastructure to a cloud data warehouse. I got to see Will Wood, a Director of Data & Analytics at Brooklyn Data, present at the Sigma booth about their embedded capabilities.I have been happy to witness Brooklyn Data leading the charge on similar efforts with our clients. I also finally got to meet a lot of our partner team at Fivetran in real life, outside of Zoom, which was really nice. We talked about some new initiatives that we’re all excited about.
Keeping the momentum going into Wednesday, we met with our friends at Coalesce and Sigma. Our team also got the amazing chance to meet Snowflake’s partner team. We celebrated our accomplishments to date and planned for new achievements in the future.
The traffic at our booth hit an all time high as attendees funneled from the Keynote onto the conference floor. I chatted with people that have been Snowflake customers for years, some just starting with the tool, and others that were just beginning their data journey. With our partners Hightouch, Heap, Atlan, MonteCarlo, eppo, LaunchDarkly, and Omni we hosted an amazing late night party at the OMNIA nightclub at Caesars Palace. We had a great time dancing the night away with over 800 members of the data community.
On Thursday morning we had a surge of people at our booth, which was an amazing way to say goodbye to everyone at the conference. Will Wood co-led another session with one of our clients, Vetsource, on centralizing data from multiple entities in Snowflake. It was exciting to see Will and Jared share a Brooklyn Data and Snowflake partner success story.
Earlier this year, Brooklyn Data was acquired by Velir, a full service digital agency. Velir combines insights, creativity, and technology to craft digital marketing experiences that help organizations forge lasting connections with their audiences that thrive. Joining Velir’s customer experience expertise with Brooklyn Data Co’s modern data stack capabilities creates a new level of data-driven impact. I was joined by four members of the Velir team at Summit and it was so impactful to chat with customers about how the two teams can help them better manage, understand, and act on organizational data.
An overarching theme of the week was how far Snowflake has come from being a “data warehouse.” Velir’s VP of Data Activation, Adam Ribaudo’s takeaway is that “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.”
Given our historical success with retail and eCommerce clients, both Brooklyn Data and Velir are excited about how the 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 foundation 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 one for the books! I’m so excited to see everyone next year in San Francisco. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and set up a call if you’d like to chat about Snowflake, data, personalization, digital experience platforms, or more!
