Snowflake: ‘There’s no AI strategy without a data strategy’

SAP, Snowflake say partners are well positioned to deliver AI outcomes for customers.

Partners need to help customers establish the data foundation required to successfully deploy agentic AI in their organisations. That’s the advice from Cathy Conroy, regional vice president, partners and alliances ANZ, Snowflake.

“Data definitely is the foundation. There’s no AI strategy without a data strategy,” said Conroy, speaking at this week’s SAP NOW conference in Sydney.

Snowflake is finding customers need to bring data together so AI can be applied across functions, in everything from marketing to finance. Seeing the opportunity, SAP and Snowflake announced a partnership late last year that allows SAP and Snowflake data to be shared and used together.

“You can use data from SAP systems in a structured way, with business semantics, and share it with Snowflake. You can also share data from Snowflake and other data sources into the SAP environment,” Jan Bungert, chief revenue officer, SAP Business AI Platform, SAP.

From delivering technology to AI outcomes

AI is now appearing in virtually every customer conversation. As a result, partners are increasingly moving from selling data infrastructure and services towards delivering AI outcomes.

“Customers are looking for that guidance and that transformation to really take advantage of everything that AI has to offer,” Conroy said.

Conroy said partners are well positioned to grow into this role because they understand the customer’s environment and can bring together the most suitable technologies.

In the next 12 to 24 months, helping customers bring together SAP and Snowflake data with AI will create a broader range of services for partners, according to Bungert. “You need to define the entire architecture. There’s a lot of business opportunity for partners,” he said.

Data clean rooms and broader ecosystem data sharing are also opportunities enabled by a stronger data foundation.

Bungert noted that SAP created Business Data Cloud partly in response to customers having multiple data silos, including multiple SAP data warehouses.

Customers are increasingly consolidating data, but not necessarily into a single platform, with organisations establishing multiple “centres of gravity” for their data, Bungert said.

Harnessing the power of Snowflake partners

Conroy said Snowflake’s partner ecosystem is “vibrant”, spanning global and regional services partners, cloud partners, strategic alliances and technology and independent software vendors (ISV) or data product partners.

“We’ve got some partners that are five-person operations through to Deloitte and Accenture-size organisations,” she told CRN Australia.

The company uses a “power of three” approach, bringing Snowflake, technology partners and services partners together to deliver customer solutions.

The ANZ partner model is broadly consistent with the global model, with global systems integrators supplemented by locally specific regional partners. That local expertise is critical because Snowflake can't deliver customer outcomes alone and need that on-the-ground expertise.

“Services partners have got skills across a lot of the technology stack” and help deliver solutions that get customers “time to value as soon as possible”, Conroy said.

Snowflake places emphasis on partners having the experience to deliver customer outcomes, rather than relying on certifications alone.

“Every partner that we work with, we make sure they’ve got that experience to be able to deliver that outcome,” she said.