Looking Back on Snowflake Summit 2022
The dates of 13th to 16th June 2022 were an important milestone in the space of data collaboration. The pioneer of data warehousing, Snowflake, hosted the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas, attended by over 6000+ data professionals across the world. After 2 years of hibernation and siloed working due to COVID, this live event came as a rescue boat for the data community, providing the opportunity to collaborate, discuss ideas, and share knowledge on anything and everything data.
At Hevo, we have been constantly collaborating with thought leaders through online events and webinars for the past two years, but nothing compares with the meaningful impact of face-to-face interactions on data.
Being a trusted partner of Snowflake for Modern ELT, empowering 1000+ customers from 40+ countries with data integration, we couldn’t miss out on attending this monumental event. We felt it was crucial to attend the Summit in Las Vegas to hear, empathize, and deeply understand the pain points of the data community.
Experiencing such a large-scale event left us with a plethora of ideas, insights, and learnings. Let’s hear the news directly from the horse’s mouth — the team from Hevo who attended the Summit — Siddhartha from Marketing, Krish from Sales and Partnerships, and Manan from Account Management.
Sharpening the Blade: Pre-Summit
From the very beginning, the experience of preparing for the Summit was a whirlwind. Multiple teams — Partnerships, Marketing, Operations, Sales — came together to plan and organize the booth, goodies, narratives, demos, and logistics.
Manan remembers the weeks before Summit with a wry grin, “Diamonds are created under pressure–and there were definitely some diamonds forged during this time, whether they be unlocked hidden talents or budding friendships.”
Our entire planning was based on the main objectives we aspired to achieve while there. As Krish mentions, “It was important for us to stay true to the reason we were attending the Summit throughout the planning process. Being a trusted partner of Snowflake with over 150 joint customers, we felt the Summit was a great opportunity to brainstorm with the Snowflake team on how together we can fuel the data strategy for fast-growing businesses.”
We also knew that a large portion of the data community would be attending, and this gave us a chance to connect with them. We wanted to have active conversations on how businesses are approaching their data strategy, their selection of Modern Data Stack components, and their ELT and Reverse ETL use-cases.
Wielding the Sword: During the Summit
Every journey has its share of highs and lows. There were a few unforeseen mishaps for us — delays at immigration, missing flights, and issues with hotel check-ins. But none of this deterred the team’s morale and excitement to meet the data community.
Siddhartha recalls, “It was a very new experience for me and I was spellbound at first sight. Seeing so many folks in one room talking about data management, solving each other’s problems, and trying to move together towards a goal of serving the society with analytical insights was truly inspirational to me.”
Krish was similarly enthralled by the atmosphere. “Some booths were really appealing with their engagement activities, booth setup, customer demos, and narratives. We saw some people playing spin the wheel, others enjoying a game of Hot Wheels, and we were able to collect some amazing goodies as well!”
The best part of the whole thing, however, was the conversations. We had engrossing conversations on the best type of warehouse to use, how to maintain continuity during migration from on-premise to the cloud, and how to ensure data integrity. These made us really put on our thinking hats on how Hevo can become the right choice for ensuring seamless and reliable data replication.
The Summit also helped us realize much the data community appreciates emerging SaaS-based Product-led companies for India. Manan recalls a particularly poignant experience, “On the second day, I had conversations with members of engineering teams from Fortune 500 companies, many of them Indians, and they expressed how proud they are that a reliable and high-quality product like Hevo is coming out of India.” Hearing this left an indelible impression on us and further increased the pride that we feel in what we do at Hevo.
Simultaneously with the conversations at the booths, there were many talks from a wide variety of speakers taking place. The insights from speakers from companies like Fidelity, Wells Fargo, and Capital One gave the team a wealth of knowledge throughout the experience.
Siddhartha attended a talk on talk on “How to Set up Marketing Analytics” by Carl-Johan Wehtje. It gave him quite a few insights-
a) Define the objectives clearly while choosing your Marketing Data Stack. Answer questions like the type of analytical use cases that need to be solved, the end consumers of marketing reports, the required update frequency of reports, and the extent of visibility and control of the marketing data stack. Addressing these will provide clarity and efficiency right from the beginning.
b) Start building your marketing data stack early, and think about aspects like scalability right from the beginning. The right ELT provider with a data warehouse is a great strategy to centralize your marketing data from a variety of sources.
c) Create detailed documentation of your marketing models, data lineage, and flows. This plays a vital role in developing data visibility.
Surveying the Battlefield: Post-Summit
The insights which we received from this experience are immeasurable, and the conversations in the weeks immediately following it were eye-opening. These fruitful insights are transforming into valuable actions for our Marketing, Product, Sales, Partnership, and Solutions teams.
Siddhartha elaborates on this, “The Summit was a great space to gather intelligence around the data community. We’d love to establish ourselves as thought leaders in this space, and understanding the community is key to that. In our conversations with data practitioners, we understood that everyone is very interested in the entire modern data stack as a whole rather than focusing on smaller components of it like ETL. We had some great conversations revolving around the entire data stack, from data collection to data consolidation. Conducting surveys or asking more questions is something we can focus on in the future Summits.” Business expectations for data infrastructure are changing very rapidly and this is very evident. While legacy organizations are solving for migrating to cloud-based data infrastructure, digital native organizations are solving for streaming with a latency of less than a minute.
Another key takeaway from all the conversations at the Summit was the potential to collaborate and partner among the various SaaS companies solving for the modern data stack. Every interaction at the Summit was an open-minded exploration of what can be achieved together.
The learnings we’ve had through this monumental experience, the connections we’ve created, and the feedback we’ve received will propel us to do better and aim higher for future events that we attend, including the next Snowflake Summit, and push us towards our goal of revolutionizing the modern data stack as well!
