 Hey everyone, it's theCUBE, the leader in life to coverage. We are live at Snowflake Summit 2023 from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. This is day one of two and a half, I'll say three days of coverage on theCUBE. But you know that because you've been paying attention. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, you know this saying, eat your own dog food. I personally like drinking your own. Our Champagne. People don't like when we say that, but you know, it's not always pretty. It isn't. So I think we're going to be talking about drinking our own Champagne. Snowflake talks about itself as customers here and we're going to be talking about that next. And why that's impactful. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Sonny Betty, chief information and data officer at Snowflake. Great to have you back, Sonny. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Nice to see you guys around. Eat your own dog food or, and these days dog food is pretty fancy. So that's not so bad. Drink your own Champagne. But I saw that Snowflake refers to itself as customer zero. Talk to our audience about what that means. What's the impact it's having on Snowflake's customers and profitability? So look, you know, we're innovating at speed or light inside our company. And customers are asking for those innovations to be given to them as soon as the product is ready. And we truly believe inside the company that if we start to implement those solutions as soon as they're ready, it gives us amazing input for the engineering team and the product management team to shape up the architecture so that when we go to customers with that solution, we're really delighting with that experience, right? And so it has multiple benefits. A, engineering and product management is getting the feedback. Customers are able to adopt that as quickly as possible. And then it creates an incredible amount of energy inside the company because now we're like customer zero, right? I mean, how amazing of an opportunity that is for employees working at Snowflake. All right, so I got to go off script. Don't hate me. So I was just here with one of your customers. She can't wait to get her hands on Unistore, right? Are you using it internally? How's it going? Unistore, native iceberg tables, all the cool stuff that we saw announced. We are using, you know, some portions of it. But pretty much, Dave, you have to think about it. Every single solution that we're going to market with, we try to implement it internally, you know? And with the whole ML and AI buzz now, you know, there's so many moving pieces. That's why Frank was saying, it's not free. He was sort of jabbing. Jensen last night, like how about a little discount on the GPUs? That's right, 95%, right? But Jensen had a good retort. Use more, you'll save more. It's like shopping at Wegmans. So talk a little bit about your role as Chief Data and Chief Information Officer. What are some of the key challenges that you're seeing in your customers and your prospects in the similar role from a data challenge perspective, knowing that, hey, to have an AI strategy, we have to have a really solid data strategy. Yeah, look, I just had a panel right before this with three incredible Chief Data Officers from, you know, from the industry, from different, different business. And, you know, the common set of problems are still the same, right? I mean, it's the same common set of problems, which is how do you make sure that you have, you know, a unification of all the data coming into a platform. So, you know, data is growing every year. How do you bring it in snowflake? You bring it with like no friction. Believe it or not, FTP is a 50-year-old technology, 51-year-old technology. My plea to the Chief Data Officers is let's all unite and take a promise. Let's kill FTP, right? Time to say goodbye, you know? Put in the graveyard, never want to see you again. But believe it or not, those Chief Data Officers are buying a lot of data and there's these legacy companies out there that are selling these data sets, but they still haven't modernized on putting their data on data marketplace. So it's just not snowflake going and talking to these suppliers of data that please put your data on data marketplace. We also need a unification voice from the Chief Data Officers, Chief Information Officers, that we all are going to promise to modernize our data platform and in that process, we want you to put your data into data marketplace and you're still going to make the money, but it's just more simple or easy to do it. So there's still elements of that that are challenging for the Chief Data Officers. FTP is almost as old as COBOL, Frank was joking about COBOL last night. When I first met you, I was struck by the sort of unification of the CIO and CDO role, but given the platform unification actually makes sense to me. Although at the time, Sonny, I think you were the de facto CISO as well. Which again, when you think about governance and PII and security, makes sense to have that all integrated, although I presume you've pyramided yourself out in that regard. Yeah, so look, I mean, I've been very fortunate that I have hired some really incredible leaders that run IT for me, data for me, security for me, because my role has really evolved even the last three and a half years that I've been here. I would say that if I show you the trajectory of my calendar on how much time I'm spending internal versus how much time I'm spending external with customers, it's gone from zero, the day one I started, to now close to 70%. Extra. I'm only working with Chris Degnan, our sales leadership team, and his entire gang globally in talking to them about onboarding them, why Snowflake is the right platform, or if the customer's already onboarded, what are the use cases? What are the common practices? What are the best architecture? And so my role has completely become external, and that would not be even possible if I didn't have an awesome team underneath me that run my day-to-day IT. So I do spend 35% of time on those functions, but the majority of my time is going talking to customers. And in terms of the transformation of your role, we talk about that often with transitional CIOs, CDO transformational, obviously it sounds like you're quite transformational the last few years. Where have the customers been in helping to drive that transformation as you're now spending 70 plus percent with them? Yeah, look, fortunately for me, we're born in the cloud. Everything that we, and we're a 10-year-old company, but the reality is we're probably like six, seven-year-old company because the first three, four years were just building the product and go to market, right? So we didn't buy a lot of systems in the first three, four years. And in the last six, seven years, we bought every single application for the enterprise that's needed to scale and grow the company, right? And so I never had to worry about non-transformational stuff because I don't have anything legacy stuff to move. I don't have anything on-prem, I have everything in the cloud. So it's all about my team's ability to help give employees a great experience, secure the environment, scale the company, get to new markets, right? These are the only initiatives we have in the company. And so I think traditionally other CIOs have a lot of legacy stuff. They have data centers to exit. They have things to migrate to the cloud. We don't have any of that. So all my energy, my time, my bandwidth, and my entire team's bandwidth energy is all going into transformational initiatives. When I, having said that, when I talk to CIOs, I'll ask them about, is everybody sassified? And I'll say, okay, but the data's locked inside the SAS app, right? Because we've, basically the business process is not embedded in the data. The data's embedded in the business logic. Excellent point. And so how do you deal with that? Given that you've got all these SAS applications, what a lot of people do is they suck it in and they stick it in the data warehouse and then it becomes stale. How do you get around that problem? Yeah, so great question. Glad you asked that. So look, we first of all think that every single automation that we are implementing for Snowflake, any system that we're implementing at Snowflake, we think about data exactly the way we think about security. You design the data into the implementation of that automation. You don't do that after the fact. It's like imagining you're building a house. You don't do the plumbing after the fact. You do it when your foundation is being built. No insulation. Yeah, so that's first principles. Then what we really believe is that the enterprise SAS applications are fantastic companies like ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce. They're amazing companies, amazing applications that they have built. They solve the business process end to end. It's a workflow automation that they solve. They drive productivity. But we truly believe that that application has a lot of incredible insights and data. It needs to come into a meaningful location like Snowflake. That integration of how that data comes into Snowflake has to be very, very seamless. Has to have no friction. So we are investing in a lot of partnerships with these SAS providers, either through a connector or through data sharing. So that if I'm a data engineer, I don't want to be dealing with data ingestion all day long. The connector and or data sharing takes all that work away from you and it actually also secures it. So you don't have to stitch security around it. Third point on that is, once that data comes into Snowflake, it needs to be correlated with other sources. Like we're a Workday ERP system and we also use Salesforce. But our metering and billing system is inside Snowflake because it calculates how much usage you're doing. Now my revenue team needs to pull all these things together. Now imagine if they were doing all of this stuff into in Workday, there's no way for them to do that. So back to your SAS questions. I think it's incredible amount of wealth of information sitting in that applications, but it's incomplete unless you bring it together, correlate it, ask the right questions and then drive the right outcomes. So the answer in part is use Snowflake, okay, but that's the obvious part. But also you had to architect a data strategy and a business process strategy around that. So when you, you're now 70% of your time external, I presume this is, you spend a lot of time talking to customers about other things. This is the only discussion the CIOs. Because they either have these type of data sitting in legacy systems, or they haven't made the migration of moving some of the SAS data into the Snowflake. So we truly believe that Snowflake for the IT organization is the de facto enterprise data platform. And you can only take advantage of it if you correlate it. And you can only take advantage of it if you enrich it, model it, and then really drive the right outcomes based on the, you know, your company's strategies. What's the journey for customers that have disparate systems that don't have this integration, this unification? How do they partner with Snowflake to really start abstracting that, those silos so that they can really pull data sources together to make the right decisions that are going to generate revenue? Well, I think, look, you know, just the whole buzz around AI and ML and I think also I feel is going to be a forcing function to drive that consolidation. It's the catalyst, you know, Jensen said it yesterday best, right? He's like, you know, what's your favorite database? Right? And then we're going to put AI to it. Well, if you don't have that data in a consolidated place and it's not protected and secure and governed, how can it do these amazing things that every company is trying to do right now? So I truly believe that the consolidation question that you have, if it's being pushed right now through this whole AI buzz that we're seeing in the marketplace. Yeah, he had a very powerful seed. He said, two questions you should ask, what is your favorite database and most important database? And then if you had a really smart person, AKA the AI, what would you have that person ask the data? And I think back to the big data days, Sonny, that was always the hard part was actually which questions to ask. So how have we evolved in that regard? Do you know what questions to ask? Well, I think we are, you know, the most amazing thing that I see the transformation happening is you would have these like amazing people in the line of business who would ask IT organizations, hey, I'm trying to find this trend and I'm trying to find that trend. Can you help me with this? Or I'm trying to find an answer to this question. Can you help me with this? Unfortunately, they were looking at all these dashboards. Right? They were just looking at these dashboards and trying to ask the, why did this happen? When did that happen? How did that happen? Where did that happen? Why did not? So it was really iterative and very hard to do it. But with the simplification of how data comes into a platform now, you don't have, it just works. So you've taken all that operational work away from the day-to-day grind that used to happen in an on-prem or non-cloud environments. Now, the line of business have also become smarter. I mean, it's amazing for me to see how many people at Snowflake, actually no Python, in the business. And so my job as a CIO is to make sure that data gets in, right from the beginning of the automation, the infrastructure is available and highly, highly reliable. And then really giving them the tools to actually innovate and ask the right type of questions. No more dashboards, less gas, why did this happen? And they should have, if they have questions for the next four wise, infrastructure is not going to come in the way. Is there innovative ability and imagination that would come in the way? She's saying it's not about the Viz, it's about the answer. Exactly, exactly. How do you lead given that you're so externally focused now? How do you lead your team? So look, I mean, we have some incredible leaders that we have hired, so that helps. But then we've also come up with incredible metrics and KPIs that are universally adopted globally for our company. And I attend a lot of those meetings on a regular basis every week. Actually my first meeting on Monday is called Operations Metrics Review Meeting. And it's a rotating topic, one day we'll do security, one day we'll do employee experience, one day we'll do cost, and so on. All the things that IT is responsible, data is responsible for. And we have systemized it in a manner that we measure the right stuff and we have developed enough automation that if there is any variation to it, it triggers the right set of actions that are needed. And then we have these review meetings, governance meetings, where we don't have any PowerPoints, we use Snowflake to drive how we're doing and its full transparency and inclusiveness. I mean, this Monday meeting, I have like 300 plus people in my org, but on any given Monday, nine o'clock in the morning, I will have like 100 plus people on the call reviewing these set of metrics all globally in Snowflake and measuring the right stuff. And we can drive an employee experience, what happened in like last quarter in one week, in one hour, and we will know exactly where there is some areas of improvement that we have not yet invested in. I mean, this is again, you know, data, right? It's data, exactly, yeah. That's how you lead by data. It's a crystal ball. Last question for you, Sunny. What's your favorite Snowflake customer story? Maybe it's Snowflake, that's customer zero, that really shines a light on the value that this company is delivering continuously to its customer base. My gosh, so many of them. I think the recent one that I heard which was really fascinating is JetBlue. And so, you know, you can imagine like JetBlue's promise to its customers is on time delivery and ensuring that everybody lands safely on time and their baggage arrives on time, you know, and they have an amazing track record with that. But it's amazing how data has helped them achieve that objective and how data has given the visibility to their customer base to enjoy that experience. But they didn't stop over there, right? They also have a goal of ESG. So what they're doing now is, you know, they're ingesting all these weather patterns real time, because weather changes every hour. And imagine they're flying their planes and they're getting data to the pilots in the plane real time, sometimes an hour before the flight or sometimes during the flight, with still making that number one objective to get there on time and safely, but also achieve ESG reduction. And I don't know the exact number, I think it's 20% or something, where how they have reduced their ESG carbon footprint by using data and all this, you know, correlation that's needed real time to reroute flights and get there on time and meet that goal. Ah, the power of data. That's an incredible story. Absolutely, very, very compelling. Sunny, thank you so much for joining us, talking about how you're leading the transformation of the role, what Snowflake is doing to really enable its customers to have compelling stories with data and delight those customers. We really appreciate having you back on the queue. Thank you so much for having me over. It's been our pleasure. Good to see you. Good to see you. We're our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, we're going to be talking with customer, Snowflake customer, BNY Mellon, Pershing X, about data trends and FSI adoption of the financial services data cloud and Pershing X data story and plans with Snowflake. We'll see you in a minute.