Salesforce, Snowflake and Aqueducts
By: Dave Dixon
Tags: User Experience, Snowflake, Salesforce, Tableau, Analytics

Astute observers of the CRM and analytics space probably noticed Salesforce’s recent interest and investment in Snowflake. Investment both in terms of capital — 250 million to date, and in Salesforce’s focus on integrating the Snowflake ‘Data Cloud’ more tightly with Tableau CRM and Tableau. These efforts continue a trend of large resource commitments in the data and analytics space by Salesforce that has been going on for the last several years. In addition to the funding of Snowflake, Salesforce purchased Tableau for over 15 billion Dollars in 2019 and paid a reported 800 million for the marketing analytics firm Datorama in 2018. That same year, Salesforce paid 6.5 billion for Integration powerhouse Mulesoft. But why the huge investment in data and analytics, and why Snowflake in particular? Interestingly, I think Ancient Rome provides a useful analog for what Salesforce is trying to achieve.

Most people recognize the enormous impact the Roman empire has had on western civilization. The impact of the Roman legacy is evident today in countless ways in the areas of philosophy, law, politics, and art. What may be less recognized, however, is the importance of Roman advances in infrastructure that allowed the city state to grow to a thriving empire during a period of immense competition and adversity. Roman advances in road building allowed Rome to create a network to greatly expedite commerce and connect its growing empire. These roads provided important conduits for goods and troops, but also for the exchange of information and ideas. The invention of the aqueduct provided the freshwater required for the city of Rome’s massive growth. The benefits of improved roads and aqueducts is that they enabled a much more efficient means of transporting critical resources such as water, food, and people. These Roman architectural and infrastructure advancements were not a by-product of Roman success, but a key to it.

Fast forward 2000 years and we see similar imperatives in the data, analytics and CRM systems space. Just as advanced and well thought out infrastructure was critical for Rome’s growth and survival, having an advanced and well-planned data infrastructure is critical to modern businesses ability to survive and thrive. Instead of food, water and people, the critical resource being transported is information. Salesforce understands this, and that is why they are investing so heavily in the data and analytics space, and specifically in Snowflake. Snowflakes’ unique features as the ‘data cloud’ make it a great compliment to existing Salesforce and Tableau capabilities and a natural choice for those wanting to accelerate their CRM and analytics projects. A few examples of how Snowflake can help enhance your Salesforce and Tableau capabilities include:

Snowflake Data Marketplace — Snowflake’s data marketplace makes it easy to subscribe and access hundreds of different data sets from third party providers. This data can be combined with your existing company data to provide a deeper view of customers and the business landscape. Given Tableau CRMs and Tableau’s native data connectors and direct query access to Snowflake, it becomes nearly frictionless to create a more wholistic view than internal data alone could provide. This feature can be extremely useful for both traditional and predictive analytic use cases and can significantly upscale Customer 360 programs.

Snowflake Data Exchange — Snowflake’s data exchange makes it easier for firms to share information with one another. For instance, distributers can publish sales data, and suppliers can share data with manufacturers. Having a ‘common’ platform that allows for the easy grooming, publishing, and sharing of datasets has numerous potential benefits for CRM and analytics focused scenarios, including driving a better understanding of customer activity, forecasts, and channel sales.

Cloud Scale/Cloud management — Snowflake’s high-performance query and data engine can run on AWS, Azure, or GCP and provides many of the same benefits users have come to expect from cloud-based architecture. Snowflake was the first cloud data warehouse to be built from the ground up for the cloud, and ingeniously designed to separate compute from storage. With the ability to scale elastically and no need to tune, configure or patch hardware, Snowflake allows users to focus on higher value activities and spend less time on server and hardware administration functions.

Superior connectivity options — Snowflake makes it easy to consolidate data from many different sources with its wide variety of connectivity options. Salesforce has extended these functions even further in their Tableau CRM product by creating multiple bi-directional connectivity options. This makes it possible to write CRM data into Snowflake, and query data out, accelerating enterprise data warehousing and analytics efforts. Furthermore, Snowflake’s decision to leverage industry standard SQL enables users and administrators to quickly leverage and use the platform. The seamless integration of Salesforce, Tableau and Snowflake allow data driven insights, including predictions and traditional analytics to be surfaced within CRM workflows in Salesforce, regardless of the data’s original source.

Ultimately, Salesforce is investing in, and partnering with Snowflake because they understand the importance of a modern data infrastructure and they recognize data is the fuel for ML/AI, analytics, and a more intelligent CRM user experience. Just as aqueducts and roads provided the necessary infrastructure for moving vital resources to fuel the growth of ancient Rome, Snowflake can provide the infrastructure needed to serve up data driven insights vital to decision making, fueling company growth. Coupled with Salesforce’s best in class sales and service platform, and Tableau’s superior analytics and predictive capabilities, there are clear synergies of making Snowflake an integral part of your analytics and CRM systems infrastructure.