 Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Raj Ghasen joins me now, the Chief Product Officer at Alation. Raj, great to have you on the CUBE, welcome. It's great to be here, Lisa. And I've been a fan for a while and excited to have a chance to talk with you live. And we've got some exciting stuff to talk about. Alation, in terms of the success in the enterprise market, I see more than 25% of the Fortune 100 doing great there as customers. Alation and Snowflake, before we get into your exciting news, talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the partnership. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, we've always been a close partner and integrator with Snowflake. And last year, Snowflake became an investor in Alation and they participated in our Series D round. And the thing I'm most excited about beyond that is we were announced in the Snowflake Summit back in June, to be their data governance partner of the year for the second year running. And so we've always had a close relationship with Snowflake, both at the go-to-market level and at the product level. And, you know, the stuff that we're about to talk about is a testament to that. Absolutely it is. So talk to us before we get into the announcement, what you're seeing in the market as organizations are really becoming much more serious about being data-driven and building a data culture, what are you seeing with respect to enterprises as well as those smaller folks? Yeah, no, it's a great question. I mean, you hear the tropes, data is the new oil, data is like water, it's essential. And we're seeing that very consistently across every customer, every segment, every geo that we talk to. I think the challenges that organizations are seeing that are leading to the amazing growth that we've seen at Alation are, there's so much data, they don't know where it resides. You've got silos or islands of knowledge that exist across the enterprise and they need a data intelligence platform to bring it all together to help them make sense of it and ultimately build a data culture that lets their employees make data-driven decisions as opposed to relying on gut. And so those are some of the macro trends that we're seeing and with the migration of data to the cloud and in particular Snowflake, it seemed like a huge opportunity for us to partner even more closely with Snowflake. And we're excited about the progress that we've seen with them thus far. All right, let's get right into it. So first of all, define a data culture and then talk to us about how Alation and Snowflake are helping organizations to really achieve that. Yeah, it's interesting. The company vision that we have at Alation is to empower a curious and rational world. And what that really means is we want to deliver solutions that drive curiosity and drive rational behavior. So making decisions based on data and insights as opposed to gut or the highest paid person's opinion or what have you. And so delivering a data culture, building a data culture, which is something we hear from all the CDOs that we talk to is, hey, Alation, help us drive data literacy across the organization, provide that single source of reference. So if anybody has a question about, do we have data that answers this or what kind of performance are we seeing in this product area? Give me a starting point for my data exploration journey. And that's really where Alation and our data intelligence solutions kind of come into the play. So unpack Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake. Talk to us about what it is, why you're doing it, what the significance of this partnership and this solution is delivering. Absolutely. So the Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake is a brand new offering that we just brought to market. And the intent really was, we've had massive success in the global 2000. You mentioned the progress that we've had with Fortune 100 customers. We see the need for data culture and data literacy and governance in organizations that are massive global multinational enterprises all the way down to divisions of an organization or even mid-market and SMB companies. And so we thought there was a huge opportunity to really drive data culture for those organizations that are adopting Snowflake but still need that data intelligence overlay across the data that's in the Snowflake Cloud. And so what we did is we launched the Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake as a free trial and then low-cost purchase solution that can be adopted for less than $100,000 a year. Got it. So from a target market perspective, that lower end of the market for, of course, these days Rajas, we talk about every company regardless of size, regardless of industry and location has to be a data company. Getting there and really defining and going on a journey to get there is really complex. So you're going now down market to meet those customers where they are. How will Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake help those customers, those smaller customers really become data-driven and adopt a data culture? Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest goal that we had was making it really simple and easy for them to begin this journey. So, you know, we're now live in the Snowflake Partner Connect portal. And if someone wants to experience the power of Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake, they just need to go to that portal, click the Alation tile, and literally within less than two minutes, a brand new instance of Alation is spun up. Their Snowflake data is automatically being cataloged as part of this trial and they have 14 days to go through this experience and get a sense of the power of Alation to give them insights into what's in their Snowflake platform, what governance options they can layer on top of their Snowflake data cloud and how the data is transforming across their organization. So talk to me about who you're talking to within a customer. I was looking at some data that Alation provided to me and I see that, according to Gartner, data culture is priority number one for chief data officers. But for those smaller organizations, do they have chief data officers? Is that responsibility line still with the CIO? Who are you engaging with? Yeah, it's a very, very really great question. I think the larger organizations that we sell to definitely have a CDO and CDO sometimes is a chief data and analytics officer in smaller organizations or even in divisions of big companies that might be target customers for ACS for Snowflake could be a VP of analytics, could be a head of marketing operations, could be a data engineering function so that might roll up into the IT. And so I think that's what's interesting is we wanted to take the friction out of the experience process and the trial process and whoever is responsible for the Snowflake instance and leveraging Snowflake for data and analytics, they can explore and understand what the power of Alation layered on top of Snowflake can provide for them. Okay, so another thing that I uncovered in researching for this segment is McKinsey says, data culture is decision culture. I thought that was a really profound statement, but it's also such a challenge to get there as organizations of all sizes are on various points in their journey to become data driven. What does that mean? Well, how do Alation and Snowflake help customers really achieve that data culture so that they can really have that decision culture so they can make faster, better data-based decisions? Yeah, so I think a huge part of it, like if we think about our big area of focus, how do we enable users to find, understand, trust, govern and use data within Snowflake in this instance? And so step one to drive data culture is how do you provide a single source of reference, a search box, frankly, Google for your data environment so that you can actually find it? Then how do you understand it? What's in there? What does it mean? What are the relationships between these data objects? Can I trust this? Is this sandbox data or is this production data that can be used for reporting and analytics? How do I govern the data? So I know who's using it, who should use it, what policies are there? And so if we go through the set of features that we built into Alation Cloud Service for Snowflake, it enables us to deliver on that promise, the very end resulting in the ability to explore the data that exists in the Snowflake platform as well. Let's go ahead and unpack that now. Talk to me about some of the key capabilities of the solution and what it's enabling organizations to achieve. Yeah, so it starts with cataloging the data itself. You know, we are the data catalog company. We basically define that category. And so step one is, how do we connect to Snowflake and automatically ingest all the metadata that exists within that Snowflake cloud as well as extract the lineage relationships between tables? So you can understand how the data is transforming within the Snowflake data cloud. And so that provides visibility to begin that fine journey. You know, how do we actually discover data? On the understand and trust front, I think where things get really interesting is we've integrated deeply with Snowflake's new data governance features. So they've got data policies that provide things like row level security and data masking. We integrate directly with those policies, extract them, ingest them into Elation so that they can be discovered, can be easily applied or added to other data sets within Snowflake directly from the Elation UI. So now you've got policies layered on top of your data environment. Snowflake's introduced tagging and classification capabilities. We automatically extract and ingest those tags, they're surfaced in Elation. So if somebody looks for a data set that they're not familiar with, they can see, oh, here are the policies that this data set is applied to. Here are the tags that are applied. And so Snowflake Elation actually becomes almost like a user interface to the data that exists within that Snowflake platform. And then maybe just two other things with the lineage that we extract, one of the most important things that you can deliver for users is impact analysis. Hey, if I'm gonna deprecate this table or if I'm gonna make a change to what this table definition is, what are the downstream objects and users that should know about that? So, hey, if this table's going away and my Tableau report over here is gonna stop working, boy, it'd be great to be able to get visibility into that before that change is made. We can do that automatically within the Elation UI and really just make it easier for somebody to govern and manage the data that exists within the Snowflake data cloud. So easier to govern and manage the data. Let's go up a level or two. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that this solution is gonna help organizations to achieve. We talked about every company these days has to be a data company. Consumers expect this very personalized, relevant experience. What are you thinking some of the outcomes are gonna be that this technology and this partnership is gonna unlock? Yeah, no, I think step one, and this has always been a huge area of focus for us, is just simply driving business productivity. So the data that we see in talking to CDOs and CDAOs is the onboarding and getting productive, the time it takes to onboard and get a data analyst productive, it can be nine to 12 months. And we all know the battle for talent these days is significant. And so if we can provide a solution, and this is exactly what we do that enables an organization to get a data analyst productive in weeks instead of months or potentially even a year, the value that that analyst can deliver to the organization goes up dramatically because they're spending less time looking for data and figuring out who knows what about the data, they can go to Elation, get those insights and start answering business questions as opposed to trying to wrangle or figure out does the data exist and where does it exist? So that's one key dimension. I'd say the other one that I'd highlight is just being able to have a governance program that is monitored, managed and well understood so that whether it's dealing with CCPA or GDPR, some of the regulatory regimes, the ability for an organization to feel like they have control over their data and they understand where it is, who's using it and how it's being used. Those are hugely important business outcomes that CIOs and CDOs tell us they need. And that's why we built the Elation Cloud Service for Snowflake. On the first front, one of the things that popped into my mind in terms of really enabling workforce productivity, workforce efficiency, getting analysts ramped up dramatically faster also seems to me to be something that your customers can leverage from a talent attraction and retention perspective, which in today's market is critical. I'm so glad you mentioned that. That's actually one of the key pillars that we highlight as well is like, if you give great tools to employees, they're gonna be happier and you'll be a preferred employer and people are gonna feel like, oh, this is an organization that I wanna work at because they're making my job easier and they're making it easier for me to deliver value and be productive to the organization. And that's, it's absolutely critical. It's this war for talent that everybody talks about. It's real and great self-service tools that are empowering to employees are the things that are gonna differentiate companies and allow them to unleash the power of data. Unleash the power of data, really use it to the competitive advantage that it can and should be used for. When we look at, when you look at customers that are on that journey, that data catalog journey, you probably see such a variety of locations about where they are in that journey. Do you see a common thread when you're in customer conversations, is there kind of a common denominator that you speak to where you really know Elation and Snowflake here is absolutely the right thing? Yeah, no, it's a good question. I would actually say the fact that a customer is on Snowflake, they're already a step up on that maturity curve. And one of the big use cases that we see with customers that is leading to the need for data intelligence solutions that Elation can deliver is digital transformation and cloud migration. We've got legacy data on-prem. We know we need to move to the cloud to get better agility, better scaling, perhaps reduce cost, et cetera. And so I think step one on that qualification criteria or that maturity journey is, hey, if you're already in Snowflake, that's a great sign because you're recognizing the power of a data cloud platform and warehouse like Snowflake. And so that's a great signal to us that this is a customer that wants to really better understand how they can get value out of their solution. I think the next step on that journey is a recognition that they're not utilizing the data that they have as effectively as they can and should be. And their employees are still struggling with, where does the data exist? Can I trust it? Who do I know tends to be more important than do I have a tool that will help me understand the data? And so customers that are asking those sorts of questions are ideal customers for the Elation cloud service for Snowflake solution. So enabling those customers to get their hands on it. There's a free trial. Talk to us about that and where can the audience go to actually click and try? Absolutely, so we'll be doing our usual marketing and promotion of this, but I'm super excited about, again, I mentioned earlier, this is part of our cloud-native multi-tenant architecture. We are live in the Snowflake Partner Connect portal. And so if you are logged into Snowflake and are an admin, you can go to the Partner Connect portal and you will see a tile. I think it's alphabetically sorted and Elation starts with A, so pretty easy to find. I don't think you'll have to do too much searching and literally all you have to do is click on that tile, answer a couple of quick questions and in the background in about two minutes, your Elation instance will get spun up. We'll have sample data sets in there. There's some guided tours that you can walk through to kind of get a feel for the power of Snowflake. So policy center, lineage, tags, our Intelligent SQL tool that allows you to smartly query the Snowflake data cloud and publish queries, share queries with others, collaborate on them for greater insights. And there's, as you would expect with any online free trial, we've got a built-in chat bot. So if you have a question, want to get a better sense of how a particular feature works or curious about how Elation might work in other areas, you can ask a question to the chat bot and we've got product specialists on the backend that can answer questions. So we really want to make that journey as seamless and easy as possible. And hopefully that results in enough interest that the customer wants to, or the trial user wants to become a customer and that's where our great sales organization will kind of take the baton from there. And there's the objective there. And I'm sure Raj folks can find out about the free trial and access that you mentioned through the marketplace. More information on elation.com I imagine they can go there to access it as well. 100%, elation.com, we're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn. But yeah, if you have any questions, you can just search for Elation Cloud Service for Snowflake or just go to the elation.com website, absolutely. All right, Elation Cloud Service for Snowflake, congratulations on the launch to you and the entire Elation team. We look forward to hearing customer success stories and really seeing those business outcomes realized in the next few months. Raj, thanks so much for your time. Thank you so much, Lisa, it's great to talk to you. Likewise, Raj Ghaseen, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. Stay right here for more great action on theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.