The Snowflake Data Marketplace is growing in popularity. In the past six months, this marketplace has grown by no less than 76 percent. At this moment, more than 500 datasets are offered.
The Snowflake data platform offers the possibility to use datasets from the marketplace in combination with your own data. Companies can benefit enormously from these datasets because they can enrich their own data with information from other companies. Snowflake users can use the datasets in the marketplace for free or at a fee. This depends on the dataset.
Data enrichment is extremely important to increase the quality of the available data. With better quality companies can also get even better analyses or predictions. This can be done with something as simple as weather forecast data. Retail chains can, for example, use this data to more accurately coordinate their BBQ meat or popsicles purchases. The better the weather forecast, the more they have to stock.
In total, about 160 organisations are now sharing different datasets, bringing the number to over 500. It is expected that many more datasets will become available in the Snowflake marketplace in the coming months. Snowflake is also developing tools to make the sharing of data even easier.
Snowflake removes main concern not to share data
Many organisations are willing to share data. Perhaps not immediately in the marketplace, but certainly privately with partners and important customers. The reason for not doing so are concerns about privacy and governance. Datasets often contain personal information that can trace back to customers or companies.
To solve this problem, Snowflake is developing a new tool that will extract all PII (personally identifiable information) from datasets before they are shared. Snowflake claims that this tool is so good at doing this that customers no longer have to worry about violating laws and regulations.
Try before you buy
Another important boost for the marketplace will soon be available in the form of a try before you buy. Companies can try out a limited part of a dataset to see whether the dataset from the marketplace can be easily used to improve their own data and whether better results can be achieved with it. Snowflake hopes to give customers a taste of the benefits, making them more willing to buy a dataset.
The Snowflake data cloud can be applied worldwide in all public clouds. So it doesn’t matter if the data resides in AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.