Introducing Salesforce Data Cloud Zero Copy for Snowflake
The limitations of traditional ETL processes pose significant challenges for businesses such as high costs of maintenance, stale data, and the creation of data siloes. Salesforce Data Cloud’s Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) Bidirectional Zero Copy integration with Snowflake, now generally available, addresses common ETL frustrations and opens up new capabilities for reducing maintenance costs, increasing data freshness, and breaks down data barriers for users across the organization.
This new integration pattern facilitates seamless data integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and Snowflake, eliminating the need to copy or move data between platforms. BYOL Zero Copy represents a significant leap forward in data integration, offering Zero Copy Data Federation access (Data-In) from Snowflake to Salesforce Data Cloud, as well as Zero Copy Data Sharing (Data-Out) from Salesforce Data Cloud to Snowflake. This pattern empowers organizations to fully leverage their combined data assets effortlessly with better options for data integration. With simplicity, live access, and scalability at its core, BYOL Zero Copy enables businesses to innovate and thrive in today’s data-driven world, and is why we are announcing a Zero Copy Partner Network of zero copy integrations with Salesforce that give customers a cost-effective, secure, and efficient way to connect all of their data.
Bidirectional Zero Copy access provides architects even more options to bring data to business users. You’re no longer limited to complex Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) data integration pipelines, as Zero Copy provides a simple experience where data from disparate sources is harmonized and unified with a point-and-click experience, and is then made instantly available for access across your Salesforce apps. Architects, that means less time standing up and maintaining brittle ETL pipelines, and more time focused on differentiated work.
To unlock the full potential of personalization, organizations must leverage their customer data effectively. By harnessing a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer across all touchpoints, your sales, service, marketing, commerce teams can gain invaluable insights to act at the right moment in customer journey. To help build this comprehensive 360 degree view, customer-facing teams require access to intuitive low-code and no-code user interfaces to unlock data. This is where BYOL Zero Copy access integrated with Snowflake becomes pivotal. It revolutionizes data collaboration to connect and unify customer data with Snowflake. With just a few clicks, architects can power better customer experiences with a rich unified profile that combines Salesforce and Snowflake data!
Salesforce Data Cloud now makes it easier than ever to build a rich unified customer profile for personalization, audience segmentation, analytics with Tableau, automation with Flow, and grounded AI with Einstein.
Exploring the challenges of traditional ETL processes
Traditional ETL processes have long been the backbone of data integration in organizations, but those processes come with challenges.
- Complexity and Cost: Traditional ETL or ELT (extract, load, transform) processes often involve building and maintaining complex pipelines requiring skilled personnel and a significant investment in both time and resources. Managing data movement, transformation, and scheduling tasks can be intricate and costly, increasing operational overhead.
- Data Freshness: Copying data during ETL processes can introduce delays, resulting in stale data that doesn’t reflect the real-time state of the business. Failures in ETL processes, such as timeouts or schema changes, can prolong data processing time and disrupt data delivery schedules.
- Data Governance Concerns: Traditional ETL pipelines often involve copying or moving data, which can raise concerns about data governance, data security, and regulatory compliance.
- Scalability and Flexibility Limitations: Scaling up traditional ETL to handle growing volumes of data or evolving business requirements can be hard requiring redesign. Additionally, rigid ETL architectures may lack the flexibility to adapt to changing data sources, formats, or integration patterns.
Unlock the value of data using Salesforce Data Cloud zero copy integration
The introduction of Zero Copy integration with Salesforce Data Cloud offers transformative benefits, addressing data integration challenges and unlocking unprecedented value for customers.
- Unlock Insights: Salesforce Data Cloud’s open and extensible architecture breaks down barriers, and enables organizations to access previously siloed data. By harnessing the power of Zero Copy, businesses can maximize the value of their data assets and unlock insights that were previously inaccessible.
- Faster Access to Data: Zero Copy integration enables swift access to data, whether federated in or shared out to external lakes like Snowflake. Accelerated data delivery empowers organizations to make agile, data-driven decisions, fostering responsiveness and competitiveness in dynamic markets.
- Data Freshness: Zero Copy integration eliminates the need to move data back and forth, and ensures that real-time data is always available. Users access live data, so they can make informed decisions based on the latest information available, without delays or inaccuracies.
- Enhanced Security and Governance: Zero Copy integration enhances security and governance by mitigating the risks associated with copying and moving data. Organizations maintain granular control over data access and governance. This ensures that they’re compliant with stringent regulatory requirements and safeguards against security vulnerabilities.
- Simplified Setup: Point-and-click data federation and sharing capabilities streamline setup, and eliminate the complexity of traditional ETL pipelines. This simplification reduces dependency on IT resources and accelerates time-to-value, enabling organizations to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives.
- Choose any tool: Customers are empowered with the freedom to choose any tool of their preference, unconstrained by platform limitations, allowing businesses to seamlessly integrate data across vendors, clouds, and regions, unlocking unparalleled scale and efficiency.
Empower your team to focus on business value and insights
Zero Copy bridges the gap between customer data and operational insights, empowering architects to help their businesses adapt swiftly to changing market dynamics and customer preferences. Various architect stakeholders are empowered by this integration pattern between Salesforce Data Cloud and Snowflake.
- Marketers can enhance segmentation and personalize campaigns by unifying CRM, engagement and offline data. Utilizing custom AI models, they can predict customer preferences, leading to hyper-targeted campaigns and increased engagement.
- Business users can leverage intelligent forecasting and performance analytics by integrating CRM and third-party data in Snowflake. This allows them to refine strategies, optimize performance, and prioritize customer-centric success.
- Data scientists can leverage Snowflake to build AI and machine learning models to determine customer purchase propensity scores. By combining Salesforce objects with Snowflake’s product category data, new insights can be unlocked, informing strategic decisions.
- Analysts can drive informed decision-making by merging historical sales and contact data from Salesforce with the web analytics data in Snowflake. This holistic view helps identify customer trends and behavior for strategic insights.
How customers can benefit from zero copy integration
A Retailer’s Journey: Leveraging POS and Weather data in Snowflake with unified customer profiles in Salesforce Data Cloud for personalized marketing, AI and analytics.
To see how easy it is to use Salesforce Data Cloud’s Zero Copy integration with Snowflake, let’s look at how a retailer creates an operational customer profile for their valued shoppers to deliver highly-personalized experiences.
A large retailer uses POS data in Snowflake to personalize marketing campaigns and customer engagement in Salesforce Data Cloud. Marketers have set up cross channel templates that personalize promos across email, mobile, and web as well as in their engagements with sales and service reps. To make sure these product recommendations are relevant, we also recommend products based on what the customer engages with, using Web engagement data; we also consider products that they haven’t purchased using all purchase data, including Commerce purchases from Salesforce and POS purchases coming in from Snowflake.
Live Access to Snowflake Data with Secure Connectivity
In our retail example, the data specialist first creates a secure connection between the Snowflake instance and the Salesforce Data Cloud org. Once the connection has been established, the data specialist creates the data stream connection, where they define the objects and fields that they want to use. They then choose to create a new data stream based on the Snowflake connection that they just created.
Map and Harmonize the Data
With live access you can now start using this data in Salesforce Data Cloud to map the data lake object (DLO) that’s created when a data stream is deployed to an existing or a custom data model. In this case, the retailer created their own custom data model and mapped the fields using external Data Lake Objects federated from Snowflake.
All your data is now simply available for use with any of the supported Salesforce Data Cloud services. Users have the same experience, whether the data resides internally or externally.
Segment and Activate
Now the marketing team has all that they need to initiate the segmentation to generate the targeted customer cohort. The marketing manager begins by creating a new segment based on the unified individual. For example, the Marketing team creates a segment of people that have no open service cases, who have a high affinity to purchase clothing based on Web engagement data.
Once the Segment is created it can be activated across any channel or platform to power amazing customer experiences. That includes advertising, websites, commerce portals, in-app, email, SMS, search, print, and outbound call centers.
Build Purchase Propensity Models in Snowflake using Salesforce Data
The marketing team now wants to use the resultant data to further enhance their marketing. And they want to share the results with the data science team to run purchase propensity machine learning models in Snowflake. To achieve this, they utilize the data sharing capability in Salesforce Data Cloud. They can share customer purchase insights and the rich data about unified individuals with their Snowflake account. Now that Salesforce Data Cloud objects are available in Snowflake, the data science team can create and build the model in Snowflake, leveraging both Salesforce and Snowflake data.
Enrich CRM with Unified Data from Snowflake
In addition to the retailer’s digital marketing campaign efforts, they want to ensure the purchase propensity spend score they built in Snowflake is promoted to the profile’s Contact information within Salesforce. Then the retailer’s sales or service reps have the recommended next actions to strengthen customer relationships and drive more effective sales. They have federated purchase propensity data from Snowflake through the Zero Copy data federation connector. To enrich CRM objects with the data from Snowflake, they have leveraged Salesforce Data Cloud’s Copy Field Enrichment capability and now they see Salesforce Data Cloud attributes embedded directly on the contact record.
Generate Insights in Tableau
The campaign is so successful that the retailer’s leadership team wants to see a Tableau dashboard of retail sales executive summary. With just a few clicks, the marketing team uses Tableau insights in Salesforce Data Cloud to generate a report showing top sales, top selling stores, top selling product categories etc.
Salesforce Data Cloud integrates fully with BI tools like Tableau, with out-of-the-box reporting and dashboards to visualize data and make it actionable across the entire C360 including Sales, Service, and Marketing organizations.
Conclusion
Zero Copy integration between Salesforce and Snowflake eliminates the complexities of ETL integrations. By establishing a trusted, secure, and flexible bidirectional integration, organizations are empowered to drive enhanced customer experiences and achieve unparalleled success. With a comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer, enriched through Salesforce Data Cloud Zero Copy across all touch points, customer experience teams can glean invaluable insights, further enhancing their ability to personalize interactions and deliver more value to customers.
Contributor to this blog:
Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Director of Product Management
Additional Resources
Contact your Salesforce or Snowflake AE today to learn how you can start leveraging BYOL Zero Copy integration. For more information about this and other integrations across our platforms, visit our Snowflake Partnership webpage.
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