Data Innovation Is In The Air — And In The Cloud — In Europe
As I headed to Stockholm for the Data Innovation Summit in Stockholm this week, there was definitely something in the air. Yes, traffic is back, with bottlenecks along the route to the airport. But there is more. There is a buzz. I’ve been to the airport multiple times over the past few years. Then, it felt like a ghost town. Now it’s back. People are going places, doing things. There is truly something in the air. But it’s something new.
The pandemic brought many changes, and among them an acceleration of technology projects, and innovation. Innovation means doing things differently. In many cases, companies are looking to take advantage of new technologies. According to several recent polls, the majority of companies have accelerated their AI adoption. A study by PwC found that 52% of companies have accelerated their AI projects during the pandemic, and 25% now have processes fully enabled by AI with widespread adoption. Of all the respondents in the PwC survey, 86% say that AI will be a “mainstream technology” at their company in 2021.
Another survey highlights similar adoption trends. A Harris Poll with Appen also found that 55% of companies accelerated their AI strategy in 2020 due to Covid, and 67% expected to further accelerate their AI strategy in 2021. And, respondents indicated commensurate budget increases: AI teams with budgets from $500k to $5 million range grew from about one-third in 2020 to 53% in 2021; those with less than $500 million fell. Another interesting finding was an overwhelming majority of organizations have partnered with external training data providers to deploy and update AI projects at scale. And, those who partner are more likely to report that they are “ahead of others.”
The bottom line: More projects, more budget and more diversity in data and data sources. The result is competitive advantage.
Data Clouds Over Europe
For those who are “going places,” how are they getting there? Many companies require a new approach to infrastructure. They need faster performance and more capacity. With data innovation in the air, the answer is — you guessed it — the cloud. According to a Harvard Business Review study, 57% of companies have increased investment in new cloud applications, services, and/or infrastructure, 53% have accelerated their existing cloud adoption projects and 51% have expanded the number of use cases they are deploying in the cloud.
But, what about innovation in Europe? Does the move to the cloud apply here? The answer is a resounding yes, and increasingly so. According to Eurostat, between 2018 and 2020 cloud adoption in Europe increased by 50%. The overall numbers are pulled down by laggards like Romania and Bulgaria. But in the Nordics, the European cloud leaders, 75% of Finnish firms and 70% of Swedish firms report cloud adoption.
What are they doing in the cloud? The leading cloud app in Europe is email. But nearly 50% of firms report hosting their data in the cloud. The Data Cloud is growing in Europe. Snowflake’s customers are innovating with data to inform business decisions, enable new services, deliver new revenue streams, and comply with regulatory requirements. Yes, sometimes innovation is needed for even the non-sexy stuff. Saxo Bank uses the Data Cloud to better visualize and share all the data needed to comply with international laws and industry requirements, saving employees time that they could better spend on other projects.
Another of my favorite customer stories here in Europe is Zabka. With its chain of over 7000 retail stores, Zabka uses data to optimize store assortment and pricing, identify new store locations, and help their suppliers forecast demand, improve products and better serve their customers.
And, yes, data innovation is also truly in the air here in the Nordics. Finavia runs the airports across Finland, and uses their data to ensure smooth travels for passengers and employees. On the Finavia Developer Portal developers can access data on flight schedules, queuing times and other sources that can be used for dashboards or data applications.
Snowflake’s Data Marketplace Hosts European Providers
As Sherlock Holmes claimed, “Data, Data, Data. I can’t make bricks without clay.” The same is true today: data is the foundation of today’s innovation. Within the Data Cloud, Snowflake also provides a home for data providers who help power innovation with new sources of data. And, we’ve got a growing number of new data providers here in Europe.
Rystad Energy, based in Norway, offers data on production, ownership and economics for all oil and gas fields globally. Funnel, also based in the Nordics, offers data services to help companies better leverage sales and marketing data. The marketplace also includes energy consumption data by zip code in Germany from Verivox, UK demographics data from CACI, a national dataset of French addresses from Atos, and a growing spatial dataset for business intelligence and machine learning from Algolytics, a Polish data provider.
And, even in the Snowflake Data Marketplace, European data innovation is “in the air.” OAG, a global travel data provider headquartered in the UK, provides flight information and aviation analytics with data collected from bookings, takeoffs and landings, departures and delays and overall passenger journeys.
With more and more data available, and the ability to share and leverage it more effectively, data innovation will continue to accelerate. I for one am happy to be part of the excitement, and to be back in the air.
