Getting the data you need in the format you want for analytics can be difficult and time-consuming. Combining vendors to find the right dataset, figuring out how to land that data in your Snowflake AI Data Cloud account, and cleaning the data to be suitable for insights… all sound like a lot of work.
This is exactly why Snowflake created the Marketplace: to allow users to share their data and applications quickly and securely from one account to another without the headache.
In this blog, we’ll explain Snowflake Marketplace and how to use it to gain valuable insights into your data. Lastly, we’ll share real experience and advice from our client Precisely, who’s been leveraging the Marketplace to achieve remarkable results.
What is Snowflake Marketplace?
Plain and simple, Snowflake Marketplace is a marketplace for data. It was built to allow users to share datasets, business intelligence tools, and even AI/ML tools with other Snowflake accounts simply and securely. Data can be provided to the Marketplace for free or as a paid service for whoever wants to utilize it.
Marketplace takes advantage of Snowflake’s unique Data Share feature, which allows users to share data between accounts without any actual data being copied or transferred. All sharing uses Snowflake’s services layer and metadata store and doesn’t take up any storage space in the consumer’s account.
Leveraging the Snowflake Marketplace for Analytics
Third-Party Data
Marketplace offers a plethora of third-party datasets to add to your data to paint a more complete picture of your business and your customers. First-party data might tell you what your customers are buying, but third-party data can add layers like demographics, customer interests, or online behavior.
With this new data at your fingertips, you can derive deeper insights to:
Improve customer segmentation for targeted marketing campaigns.
Discover new potential customers who share characteristics with your existing high-value customers. By building “lookalike audiences,” you can target your marketing efforts more effectively and expand your reach.
If you are using or planning to build predictive modeling, adding more features can drastically improve the accuracy of your model.
Here is an example taken from the marketplace of financial and demographic data that could be added to your customer data:
Enrich your Data
Not only does Marketplace contain data, but it also has providers offering services for your first-party data. Enrichment services, for example, can clean and validate your existing data to ensure accuracy and consistency. They can also add additional data points to your data before sending it back, providing all the benefits of adding third-party data yourself.
The enrichment can also be targeted with companies specializing in your industry’s data, providing best practices for setting up your data for analytical success. For example, here is an enrichment service found in the Marketplace that specializes in clinical data, promising to “standardize inconsistent clinical data from diverse systems into consistent, structured, clinically validated terminology”:
Augment With ML/AI Models
If you’re looking to use your data to make future predictions but aren’t ready to invest in a data science team yet, providers in the Marketplace have you covered. Some applications can be used by anyone on your team with data experience to create time series forecasts based on your data to help predict what can happen with a target metric.
Here’s an example of a time-series forecaster available on the Marketplace now:
Analytic Tools
Along with the more advanced tools that create AI predictions or enrich your data for you, the Marketplace has some analytic tools that may seem simple but can add a lot of value to your analytics department. These tools and datasets can expand Snowflake’s capabilities to allow you to achieve more without creating them in-house.
For instance, Snowflake already has some robust geospatial features, but using capabilities such as spatial indexes would require some heavy lifting from someone on your team. However, one bonus of the Marketplace is there’s an open-source library of user-defined functions to extend the geospatial capabilities of Snowflake:
Another simple example is calendars. Business and data analysts are asked to provide details on data over various periods by the business, such as “Give me sales quarter to date this year versus the same time last year,” which usually results in hard coding. In the Marketplace, there is a calendar that alleviates that exact use case:
Precisely’s Journey in the Snowflake Marketplace
Next, let’s see how one of our innovative clients, Precisely, is currently leveraging the Snowflake Marketplace to help businesses uncover deeper context within their data to generate more impactful insights. But first, a little bit about Precisely.
Precisely is a celebrated data integrity company that helps integrate your data, improve data quality, govern data usage, geocode and analyze location data, and enrich with complementary datasets for confident business decisions.
We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to interview the talented Andy Bell, SVP of Global Data Product Management at Precisely, to help share his experiences and advice with the Marketplace. With that, let’s get into the interview!
How Does Precisely Use the Snowflake Marketplace Today?
We leverage the Snowflake Marketplace by offering a broad selection of our key data products. Currently, there are around 50 listings on the marketplace, including datasets such as address and property data, boundaries, demographics, and risk data. The marketplace helps to showcase key aspects of the Precisely data enrichment portfolio and allows potential customers to explore and interact with the data through samples.
This helps them to understand the value of the products that Precisely can deliver via Snowflake and see how leveraging trusted third-party datasets can reveal hidden context from their data for more powerful insights.
What Benefits Have you Uncovered with Selling data on the Snowflake Marketplace?
One of the primary benefits we’ve discovered is the increased visibility that the Snowflake Marketplace provides. By listing data on this platform, we can reach an even broader audience, allowing potential customers to easily discover, sample, and interact with the data. This exposure helps drive engagement and leads to new business opportunities by demonstrating the value of the data in a way that’s hands-on.
This is particularly important because oftentimes companies will seek data for a particular use case at the moment that they need it, such as during newsworthy events surrounding natural disasters where we tend to see an uptick in the demand for relevant data. An example of this would be an insurance company urgently looking to access highly accurate insights about wildfire behaviors and being able to easily access our wildfire risk data by searching for it on the Snowflake Marketplace.
Any Tips for Businesses Considering Selling Data on the Snowflake Marketplace?
For businesses looking to sell data on the Snowflake Marketplace, it’s crucial to treat it like a storefront of your offerings. Ensure that your data products are well-represented and provide samples to allow potential customers to interact with and understand its value. It’s also important to lean into your key differentiators to ensure that you stand out amongst the competition.
For example, at Precisely, we emphasize our PreciselyID, a unique and persistent identifier that transforms address information, seamlessly connecting it to our extensive data enrichment portfolio of over 400 datasets and over 9,000 attributes.
What Challenges Did You Encounter Getting Data on the Marketplace, and What Advice Would You Give Someone Going at it for the First Time?
One of the key challenges we faced was ensuring that we had the right resources and processes in place to manage our listings on the Snowflake Marketplace effectively. It’s crucial to allocate dedicated resources to support the setup and maintenance of your data products on the platform. This includes making sure the information in your listings is accurate and up-to-date and that you have a process for responding to inquiries quickly.
Another challenge is managing customer expectations – while the marketplace offers a great way for customers to discover and sample data, it’s not a fully automated sales platform, especially when it comes to high-value data products. Potential buyers often need (and want) more information about the data, such as its provenance, which requires a more hands-on sales process.
Closing
The Snowflake Marketplace is a powerful tool for selling and using data to make more informed decisions faster and easier. New datasets, applications, and AI tools are constantly added to the Marketplace, making it a reliable and secure destination for augmenting data for better analytics.
If you need further assistance or want to maximize your use of the Snowflake Marketplace, reach out to the experts at phData. Whether you’re looking to integrate new datasets, enhance your analytics, or optimize your data strategies, partnering with phData can unlock the full potential of your Snowflake environment.
