Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Okay. Welcome to this episode of our show, True Data Ops. I'm your host, Graziano the Data Warrior. And each episode we try to bring you a podcast discussing the world of DataOps with people that are really making DataOps what it is today.
So be sure to look up and subscribe to the DataOps Live YouTube channel, because that's where you're going to find all the recordings from our past episodes. So if you've missed any prior episodes, that's where you go to catch up. Better yet, if you go to truedataops.org you can subscribe to this podcast and get proactive notifications of the next episode.
Now, my guests today are Andrew Helgeson, he's the senior manager of Data Cloud Platform Partners at Snowflake, and our very own John Marchese, our executive vice president and Chief Partner at DataOps.
Welcome to the show, guys.
[00:00:55] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Ken.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: All right, well, to get started, of course, you know, a lot of folks may not know you guys or your background, so if you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit about your background data management, a little bit about your careers and your current roles.
[00:01:13] Speaker C: Andrew, please.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, thanks again. Honored to be here.
So, Andrew Helgenson. I've been here at Snowflake for just over three years. I lead a team called the Data Cloud Platform Platform Partnerships, which is a little bit of a mouthful, but essentially our charter, our function is to lead the go to market activities with about 30 key ISVs in the spaces of business, intelligence, data engineering, observability, governance and security.
Prior to this, I spent some time at AWS in both technical sales and alliance management roles in AI and machine learning space.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:01:49] Speaker C: And hello everyone. John Marchese, part of Data Ops Live executive team focused on our alliances and strategic business development.
Work very closely with Snowflake, with Andrew and, and, and the joint teams there obviously, as well as all the other ecosystem partners.
I've been in tech my entire career, have been focused in data for about the past 12 years or so, specifically with Snowflake.
The last eight years I've been really focused on delivering alliance and partnership relationships to ecosystem companies.
Started with Calibra, companies like Periscope, Data, Scisense, Okara, and now Data Ops Live.
So starting to make a little bit of a career working with Snowflake and it's been a great pleasure.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: So yeah, hard to go wrong, Hard to go wrong with data. And then, you know, Snowflake coming along, I mean, certainly made a huge difference in, in my career. And allowed me to have a lot of fun in the last bunch of years since, since I ran across Snowflake back in 2015.
[00:03:07] Speaker C: So.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: So, yeah, good move all around.
So now, Recently Snowflake and DataOps Live have entered into something that you're all calling the Frictionless Strategic Partnership.
Can you tell the audience a little bit about what that is and what it means?
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I can start with that. So, as you know, at Snowflake, empowering data engineering teams is a key focus for us.
As customers launch more and more use cases and bring more data from more source systems into the Snowflake platform, the complexity of these data pipelines, applications, products increases and so does the need for solutions to effectively manage their life cycles. So the Frictionless Strategic Partnership is a combination of a recently announced Snowflake ventures investment in DataOps Live, which you can read about on the Snowflake Ventures blog on our website, aligned to a set of tooling that we've jointly worked to scope and develop and deliver in the DevOps for data space.
The idea being we want to help customers move to success more quickly and stay optimized for the future without incurring technical debt.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Right?
[00:04:15] Speaker C: Yeah. And basically from our standpoint, we mutually, you know, have aligned in such a, a great way just in our normal day to day partnerships and what we've achieved together as partners.
But you know, when you, when you get outside of the industry, Kent, typical customers aren't paying attention to this type of stuff. Right. They don't know what level of partner we are and how close we work together and all of that.
And you know, being exclusively focused on Snowflake at this time and having all these other, you know, great accolades of, you know, being an investment partner and an elite partner that didn't really come into play until the last moments of interaction with a customer.
Many, many of our joint customers would be like, you know, should I be using your stuff? Is Snowflake doing this as well? Are there other partners I should, you know, it was just tons and tons of kind of a gap in market assurance, market alignment, making it clear to customers that we're really doing this together and we have a, a joint purpose to do this.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah, quite a bit of confusion.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Yeah. So that was really the, the prime impetus for the partnership was to be able to put together, you know, how can we show the market that we have this alignment along with, you know, everything that comes with it, product alignment, go to market alignment, co marketing, delivery, you know, via the Snowflake Marketplace, etc.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: So yeah, delivering a consistent message to the customer base around the interaction between the two products.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Okay, so why now? You know, why developing this partnership now? I mean it's what, 20, 25, right? It's 10 years since I joined Snowflake. When I joined Snowflake back 2015. So it's been a decade. So what's causing this to happen now?
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's something we've been working on for a while and it's really in everybody's interest, everybody's best interest. Snowflakes, DataOps and our customers really to let the market know about the DataOps platform in total. And also the point solutions that we've worked with our product team and asked DataOps to develop to answer really some requests and some demands that we frequently encounter in the field.
[00:06:52] Speaker C: I think everything is about timing in life and the timing of what we offer to data engineering teams. Right. To be nimble, to be able to move quickly, get, get value quickly, to show the business, you know, better than anyone can. You know, data teams can have the best of intentions but if they can't show value quickly, they don't get funded, they don't get supported.
So the alignment of what our product offers to customers along with, you know, sh. Our, you know, his new focus and his, not his new focus, what he's brought in focus to Snowflake, you know, to really identify what's most important.
Where does Snowflake have its biggest strengths? Where is Snowflake going to dominate the market? Where is Snowflake going to put most of their investment?
Empowering those data teams. Right. Is perfectly aligned.
So, you know, this capability is strategic, you know, for Snowflake in that way to ensure that people have success and, and that's really why the timing was perfect at this moment.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
So what does this partnership really offer to Snowflake customers?
[00:08:14] Speaker C: So basically there's two components. The first component, as I said before, is really a three year, a long term perspective of joint roadmap.
Okay, what do our customers need today and what is Snowflake offering in a variety of their products?
New capabilities that they're going to come out with in the future, etc.
And where are we today and where are those gaps?
Okay, so we've laid that out from a product roadmap standpoint where, if you like to think about it, you know, Snowflake has their focus on their ball and where they're strong and lead the market. And we're doing the same in our capacity. But now we've interconnected the teams From a communication standpoint. And a Snowflake continues to advance as a company and have different primitives and different capabilities that start to, you know, support some of these, you know, market capabilities.
It's not competitive, it's completely known to us and we're going to be going backwards integrating into that.
So from a customer standpoint, you know, the real message on the, on the partner side, from a product standpoint, is that we're not going to be getting further apart as we go forward. We're going to be getting closer.
Right. We're committed to using those primitives and those capabilities that Snowflake will develop over time.
And we're going to become more and more integrated into the platform.
Right. So another way to say it is anything that we can do to get further integrated, to run on the platform, even run within the platform as a native app or utilizing Snowflake native code, we're committed to doing so. That's one thing.
On the flip side, again, just eliminating the friction in the market. We aren't one company. Right. We're two companies, but we've essentially taken our platform and now we're going to offer it up to all of Snowflake's prospects, customers, partners, as a freemium free, you know, available product, what we call, you know, in a frictionless manner.
They could go to the Snowflake Marketplace, get access to our platform, and, you know, 10 minutes later they could be productive doing work.
Right?
Yeah. They don't have to worry about talking to Data ops. They don't have to sign any contracts with us.
Everything is focused around Snowflake Marketplace access.
And we're even going to give them free credits, right? So they'll get a number of free credits per month, Ken, where they could operate, do a poc, develop, you know, some projects, you know, all, again, all with the intention that they could create something of value before they ever have to talk about paying for it or going to their, their own procurement. Okay, so, so that's, that's like one aspect of the product side.
The second aspect of the product side is obviously our joint customers. Snowflake customers occasionally ask, do you have something, do you have something to recommend? Do you have a capability for DevOps, for data, for data ops, for CICD, different ways to operationalize, you know, early stage projects or pipelines and advance them to enterprise use cases.
And the answer there is we're going to take our, our platform, which I just said in total, but we're going to create entry points or landing zones, if you will, which are going to be specific.
So we're going to have one for cicd.
Okay. And we're going to have one to operationalize new pipelines or new DBT projects. Right. That are going to need the robust capabilities of Data Ops, you know, to get them launched again. The, the concept here is if somebody needs to test or, or utilize these capabilities within Snowflake, how can we as quickly and easily get them from that realization to using the product and delivering something of value like that?
So these apps, by the way, can these entry points, these landing zones, what we're calling a dynamic suite of accelerators, a dynamic family of accelerators, which means there'll be more to come.
But starting with those two, those are native apps now in a pre release capability. We'll go to full release as we get closer to Snowflake Summit.
But those are available in a pre release and, and they, and they are native apps, you know, so again, the concept of moving everything we can into the platform as much as possible.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really about helping Snowflake customers deliver value, I'll say more easily, hence the term frictionless. Right. Of not having to go out and you know. Yeah, I know early on, certainly with Data Ops Live, it was always that. And I ran into this with, when I was at Snowflake as the evangelist with, well, should we use this tool? Should we not use this tool? You know, we're working on the contract with Snowflake. Do we. We don't have time to go work on a contract with another vendor. And that kind of slows the whole thing, the whole process down and of course frustrates the crap out of all the salespeople in the process when they know it's like, yeah, we really need this solution together.
So you guys have now put together a.
It's really a prepackaged offering via the marketplace. Right. Using Snowflake's capabilities.
I think it's great because you're using the, say, more advanced capabilities of Snowflake, I. E. Native apps in the marketplace and using it to bundle some of the great functionality that's in the DataOps Live platform already.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: And making it again, the term frictionless, making it easier for the customers to actually take advantage of all that functionality without having to go through a lot of the hoops that they had to go through before to get to it. And plus we've reduced the learning curve with the native apps.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And keep in mind, on that same level, procurement was always an issue.
Where am I getting the budget where's the budget coming from? Right. All of those things as, you know, data ops, let's say, on the, on the broadest level, if we're talking about Data Ops or DevOps for data or whatever, you know, phrase we're going to use, or even the cicd for that matter, it's not just technology, Right. It's people and process and, and whatnot.
So here, everything that we're talking about, right. Can be paid for with Marketplace credits.
So this is another really key component. So, yeah, so the big Snowflake customers, right, that have committed and have purchased, pre purchased, you know, capacity, can now use that excess capacity to buy these native applications or consume our platform.
So that is a huge, huge benefit to the customer because it's not only getting them, you know, in a better mode of, of being able to operate more quickly and efficiently, which is, you know, to their interest.
But as you said before, now it's a matter of, you know, they don't. They could. The Snowflake terms and conditions that they've already agreed to, they. The capacity that they already paid for or will pay for in Snowflake is already there to be utilized.
So, you know, that's, that's a big, A big deal in this as well.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So again, hence, part of the friction list is you've removed all of that back and forth. Now they don't have to be talking to two different sales reps at two different companies and getting separate approvals. Then you throw the freemium model in there as well. It's like, okay, we don't even have to talk about budget to get started.
[00:16:55] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: You're give free credits. I mean, who doesn't want free credits? Right?
[00:17:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: And the fact that.
[00:17:02] Speaker C: And then you bring up another.
Yeah, oh, I'm sorry.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And the fact that it's gonna allow them to burn down their, their Snowflake commitment without having to go through any weird gyrations. I remember early on there was, you know, work with AWS in the early days of Snowflake, there was some of that kind of give and take as well between Snowflake and AWS for people who had an AWS commitment. And, you know, that, that just makes life so much easier for everybody from trying to get approval to do these sorts of things. You've almost pretty much eliminated the approval process for using the Data Ops functionality. It's gone.
[00:17:40] Speaker C: That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, absolutely. So our hope is, you know, we have a lot of success with this and we'll just Continue to, you know, add additional value, add additional use cases into that family of native app accelerators and, you know, and continue from there. But you, you did remind me of something, Ken, in terms of, you know, while we would hope that all of this is as simple as it sounds, you know, we also realize that especially in the early stages here, you know, we're ready mutually, you know, to support our customers. We don't assume that everything's just going to happen perfectly without, you know, just from a product LED standpoint.
So we, you know, we're going to have our joint teams available. That was another part of the, the partnership.
You know, we're identifying customers together and prospects to go after that have these needs.
We're doing account planning, you know, Andrew and I and our mutual sales teams are going through account planning on where we've heard, you know, that these capabilities would matter or, or have been, you know, investigated previously.
And you know, we're not going to just leave the customer alone to kind of do this, you know, by themselves. Right. We're there to, you know, from, from a data ops perspective, we're gonna have weekly office hours to support people.
We're gonna have joint blogs, technical blogs and support things on our, on the medium site and other places.
We're going to be doing hands on labs for companies that come in, that's that raise their hand and say, hey, I would like to have some support.
So we're going to have all those capabilities in place to help people through it.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yeah. In addition to that, on the Snowflake side, we're doing a lot of enablement with our engineering team. So we're leveling up on the Snowflake side to help identify customers that might be encountering some of these challenges. So we're aligned in the field, we're aligned on the product side and really focused on these areas that can slow down customers getting to where they want to be with Snowflake more quickly.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a one, one qu. We actually got a question.
Sometimes we get questions on this from Jeff Jacobs. Is there a Snowflake plan to offer pricing at the organization level in addition to account level through the marketplace?
I don't know about the marketplace well enough to have any idea what that really means.
I mean, this is the, the pricing is.
How's the pricing actually going to work? You got the freemium model, right.
So that's goes from there, right?
[00:20:31] Speaker C: Yeah, so, so, so say that question one more time.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: I'm sorry, is there a plan to offer pricing at the organization Level in addition to account level. So I guess, yeah. Because any Snowflake customer can have multiple accounts, but they also have that organization tier right at the top.
[00:20:51] Speaker C: Yeah, so.
So, Andrew, do you want me to give this a shot?
[00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I'd probably have to enlist the help of our marketplace operations team to really specifically answer that. But I think what you're mentioning is the hierarchy of the, the organization and then the multiple accounts. Sometimes customers break out accounts divisionally or, you know, maybe test dev production.
So.
Yeah, John, maybe you handle that one. Or, or we can certainly, we can certainly connect with you offline and pull it.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Again, I think this is a good question. And it's, it's a question of, you know, complexity at the edge of, you know, doing this marketplace thing and trying to hit the 80% of people.
How do they come in, how do we regulate them and how do we give it away for. In a freemium way, let them get started with some caps, but that also let them convert.
So, Ken, specifically, I'll answer the question, I think, but also the question also spurs something.
We have our, our licensing model at Data Ops. Okay. Which we can get into.
And that licensing model looks and appears to be what you would expect from an enterprise software company.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:11] Speaker C: You know, which, which also means to his point, if he, if, if the company, a customer is interacting directly with us and our sales team, there's obviously discounts and things that would be applied.
Right. As the, the utilization went up and different negotiating and stuff like that here because of the frictionless movement. What we're trying to do is simply say, okay, you have your free access, you have your caps of credits at the moment that you want to deploy something or you want to pay for it, you know, and become a customer, you can just convert over and use what we call jet credits to pay for this. So we're essentially using a similar methodology to how Snowflake consumption would work.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be very clearly shown within the portal, you know, where you're at in terms of your usage. And if you're approaching a point where you'll. You'll need to start paying for the platform.
[00:23:16] Speaker C: Exactly. So from that standpoint, it's still automatic.
But to the, to the question, that would be somebody like their consumption, and their deal would be based on their utilization and their consumption, you know, and, and if there were 10 other opportunities going on within that company, that would be an edge case where they would call us, talk to our, you know, CRO, and we'd put together, you know.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Kind of aggregate it on the back.
Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:54] Speaker C: Right. So.
Yeah, so that's not.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
In terms of procuring third party software through the Snowflake Marketplace, typically the way that works is customers have a capacity agreement with Snowflake. Right. And that is usually at the organization level. So you've got your individual accounts that flow up to that, but the organization can allocate those credits however you'd like throughout those accounts. And then for Marketplace credit drawdown, the way that works is when you're in the contract or even mid contract, you can essentially carve out an allocation of Snowflake credits to be used for third party procurement through the market.
And we have lots of resources to help walk through that.
It's a slight sort of update to the contract, or if you're at a renewal point or signing your first capacity contract, you can say, all right, I want to allocate this number of credits. And by the way, if you end up not using those for third party, that you can just use them as regular Snowflake credits anyway.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: It's not locking you in. Yeah. So how customers going to go about getting access to these? It. It's going to be somewhere out on the marketplace, I guess.
[00:25:00] Speaker C: Yeah. So there'll be, as everyone likely knows, Snowflake has their, their annual summit, you know, coming up this year in San Francisco in early June.
Obviously we'll be a big participant there as an elite partner and there'll be a lot of news and, and things released at the show or coming into the show.
So the, the GA release you could expect around that time.
And as you said, Ken, predominantly these things will be available, you know, on the marketplace to be found. Obviously people could come to the Data Ops website and we'll, you know, highlight them as well and redirect people to where they need to go. Most specifically, we're in a private preview.
We are taking on, you know, select customers.
So, you know, people could come to our website and find the private preview link, you could scan this code, but essentially it's state Ops live Private Dash preview should get you there. And there'll be an intake form that will go to our sales team, you know, just a few questions and overview and, and then we'll be in touch to get you moving.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Great. And, and you mentioned Snowflake Summit, obviously that's what, a month away at this point?
[00:26:25] Speaker C: Yeah, not even.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Yeah, you guys. So, yeah, a lot of stuff going to be happening there, I assume.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: Absolutely. A lot of announcements, a lot of again, promotion.
We, we are also involved with a variety of things, you know, again, integrated with Snowflake and our technology to deliver some capabilities for the show around hands on labs and some things that we're using our technology, you know, for, for mutual benefit.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Snowflake Solutions Center.
[00:27:04] Speaker C: So yeah, yeah, part of the Snowflake Solution center in that regard. Regarding Snowflake Solutions center, one of the evenings we'll be having a, a cocktail reception to talk about, you know, our new frictionless offerings here and the, the dynamic accelerators.
And yeah, we'll also be promoting the use of Solution center, you know, to do hands on labs and other capabilities for, for different partners in the ecosystem.
So those are some of the things we'll be talking about.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: So I guess for folks that are going to Snowflake Summit, it's booth 1901, 1901 Data Ops Live. And I assume they need to come by if they want to get in on some of these events that you're doing and get the information on where it's all going to be and when and, and of course what sessions you're all presenting at to talk about these things.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: Absolutely, yeah. And one last thing that I'll say. Andrew and I are, you know, we're working stiffs and that's all we care about. But we are, we're also giving away tickets to the Ryder cup for golfers out there. There's going to be a big promotion.
Data Ops in, in conjunction with Snowflake and AWS will be, you know, having a whole Ryder cup experience with airfare and hotel nice, the whole bit. So come to the booth, we'll tell you how to get involved in into, you know that. But that'll be a common theme that you'll see around the show and at our parties and events which we think would be very fun so people should take advantage of that.
Anything else I'm missing, Andrew?
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Not that I can think of. We'll all be there. It's going to be a great summit. So come on out, come see us. I'll be at the Data Ops booth for definitely a good portion of the show. Look forward to it.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Okay. Right. And so Andrew, best way for folks to get in touch with you.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: Yeah, you can find me on my LinkedIn profile there. Send me a message or andrew helgesonsnowflake.com Happy to field any questions that come in there and talk about this or the other partners that my team manages.
[00:29:22] Speaker B: Awesome. And John, same assume LinkedIn for you.
[00:29:26] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, same. LinkedIn is great. And john.marchese@dataops live.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Very good. Well, you know, really appreciate your time this morning, guys, you know, for getting the discussion and talking about this frictionless thing. And we had a little chat about it with Keith Belanger last month on the show.
More on the technical level of what it all handles, but it's good to get it out there is why, why Snowflake and Date Ops Life have partnered on this. And it's, you know, for me, it's personally very satisfying to see this type partnership, you know, having been at Snowflake and then been working with you guys at Data Ops Live, especially around the CICD things because, you know, I assume, you know, this, John, that Data Ops Live basically got started with my conversation with Just and him asking me, what does Snowflake customers need? And at that time, the number one thing on the hit parade was cicd. It's like, how do we do CICD instead of Snowflake? It's like, it's awesome to see that that's finally, that's coming together and we're going to really be empowering Snowflake customers to be more effective and deliver value quicker and get more value out of their Snowflake account and, and make it easier for everybody to do these things. And that's just awesome to see.
AB so again, thank you guys for being here.
Enjoy Summit. You know, thanks everyone for being online and joining us today and those of you who watch us on the replay. You join me again in two weeks. It's going to be the last episode of season three. I'm going to be wrapping up the year with a real exciting discussion with one of the founders of the true Data Ops movement, none other than, you know, my buddy Guy Adams, who is the CTO and founder of DataOps Live. So that should be a great conversation. We're going to do a little bit of time traveling and retrospective on the seven pillars and, and look at where we started and how far we've come and what we just talked about today is an example of how far we've come since our original ideas about this. So you're not going to want to miss this one. And yeah, as I said, end of the season and then we'll be off for the summer. So, as always, be sure to like the replays from today's show and tell your friends about the true Data Ops podcast, send them a link, repost it, retweet it, whatever it is you do on social media, let people know what a great show we have here, and don't forget to go to truedataops.org subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any of the future episodes.
So until next time, Kent Graziano the Data Warrior signing off. For now.
