First Annual Snowflake Customer Benchmark Survey Shows Enterprises Making Progress in Uncovering Hidden Data Insights to Better Serve Customers 

Snowflake, the data warehouse built for the cloud, today announced the results of its first annual Customer Benchmark Survey. Following the success of Snowflake’s sold-out inaugural user conference, Snowflake Summit on June 3-6, the company released customer survey results to shed light on the state of data insights adoption for organisations across a variety of industries. Ninety-four percent of enterprises claim that using data-driven insights to inform business decisions improves their bottom line by enabling them to better serve customers.

Snowflake’s 2019 Customer Benchmark Survey investigated how hundreds of global enterprises, of all sizes, use data to drive progress in their organisations. From the survey, 96 percent of organisations view data as integral to how they serve their customers. Enterprises in different industry verticals all benefit from data but in varying ways. In retail, insights into the performance of individual products and promotions is key. In finance, data is primarily used to deliver personalised and unique customer experiences. Healthcare’s top priority is to meet HIPAA compliance and scale with data. For media companies, understanding and analysing user behaviour is the number one priority, while software companies’ focus is on right-sizing their data warehouses to avoid paying for idle resources.

“Relentless innovation is the way we approach product development and improvement at Snowflake,” Snowflake VP of Product, Christian Kleinerman said. “Our unique cloud-built architecture empowers users to fulfill a variety of industry-specific requirements and as their requirements evolve, we listen to customer feedback and use that input to continuously improve the product, making the technology work harder and better for them. I’m excited to see the Customer Benchmark Survey results reflect the impact Snowflake is having for our customers.”

“The need to read a specific type of compressed data was critical to us,” Slack Director of Analytics, Abhijeet Solanki said. “We asked Snowflake, and within 6 weeks they provided us the beta version to test and after a few iterations, we had it as part of our product. We value the partnership with the Snowflake team and the speed of innovation at Snowflake.”

The survey also showed that Snowflake customers are making progress in optimising data management for faster and more complete access to data insights. Thirty-six percent of respondents reported the most progress in scaling up and down their data warehouse without disruption or delay, while 35 percent saw the most improvement in the overall performance of their data management.

Other key takeaways from the Snowflake 2019 Customer Benchmark Survey include:

• Data is a major differentiator: 81 percent of surveyed enterprises said they view their data and analytics capabilities as a strong competitive advantage.
• Data governance is top of mind: 93 percent of surveyed organizations reported that having a data policy is important to the business- 71 percent said that it is either critical or very important to their operations.
• Data sharing is trending up: 53 percent of respondents said that secure data sharing is a critical part of their operation or they are planning to expand its use.
• GDPR drives technology investment: 45.6 percent respondents said that recent data regulations are causing them to invest in technology. GDPR was top of the list (57 percent) driving these investments.