 with me are Ann Christel Graham, aka AC. She's the CRO of Taland and Chris Degnan is the CRO of Snowflake. We have the go-to-market heavies on this section, folks. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's our pleasure. And so let's talk about digital transformation, right? Everybody loves to talk about it. It's an overused term, I know. But what does it mean? Let's talk about the vision of the data cloud for Snowflake and digital transformation. AC, we've been hearing a lot about digital transformation over the past few years. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. What are you hearing from customers? How are they thinking about when I come, some kind of, it's called DX? And what's important to them? Maybe address some of the challenges even that they're facing. Dave, that's a great question to our customers. Digital transformation literally means staying in business or not. It's that simple. The reality is most agree on the opportunity to modernize data management infrastructure that they need to do that to create the speed and efficiency and cost savings that digital transformation promises. But now it's beyond that. What's become front and center for our customers is the need for trusted data supported by an agile infrastructure that can allow a company to pivot operations as they need. Let me give you an example of that. One of our customers, a medical device company was on their digital journey when COVID hit. They started last year in 2019. And as the pandemic hit at the earlier part of this year, they really needed to take a closer look at their supply chain and went through an entire supply chain optimization having been completely disrupted in the, you think about the logistics, the transportation, the location of where they needed to get parts, all those things when they were actually facing a need to increase production by about 20 times in order to meet the demand. And so you can imagine what that required them to do and how reliant they were on clean, compliant, accurate data that they could use to make extremely critical decisions for their business. And in that situation, not just for their business but decisions that would be about saving lives. So the stakes have gotten a lot higher and that's just one industry. It's really across all industries. So when you think about that, really, when you talk to any of our customers, digital transformation is really mean, it really means now having the confidence in data to support the business at critical times with accurate trusted information. Chris, I've always said a key part of digital transformation is really putting data at the core of everything, not the manufacturing plant at the core and the data around it, but putting data at the center. And it seems like that's what Snowflake is bringing to the table. Can you comment? Yeah, I mean, I think if I look across what's happening and especially as AC said, through COVID, is customers are bringing more and more data sets. They want to make smarter business decisions based on data, making data-driven decisions. And we are seeing acceleration of data moving to the cloud because there's just an abundance of data and it's challenging to actually manage that data on premise. And as we see those customers move those large data sets, I think what AC said is spot on is that customers don't just want to have their data in the cloud, but they actually want to understand what the data is, understand who has access to that data, making sure that they're actually making smart business decisions based on that data set. And I think that's where the partnership between both Talon and Snowflake are really tremendous, where we're helping our customers bring their data assets to the cloud, really landing it and allowing them to do multiple different types of workloads on top of this data cloud platform and Snowflake. And then I think, again, what Talon is bringing to the table is really helping the customer make sure that they trust the data that they're actually seeing. And I think that's a really important aspect of digital transformation today. Well, awesome. And I want to get into the partnership, but I don't want to leave the pandemic just yet. AC, I want to ask you how it's affected customer priorities and timelines regard to modernizing their data operations. And what I mean to that, I think about the end-to-end lifecycle of going from raw data to insights and how they're approaching those life cycles. Data quality is a key part of that. If you don't have good data quality, you're going to, I mean, obviously you want to iterate and you want to move fast, but if it's garbage out, then you got to start all over again. So what are you seeing in terms of the effect of the pandemic and the urgency of modernizing those data operation? Yeah. Well, like Chris just said, it accelerated things. For those companies that hadn't quite started their digital journey, maybe it was something that they had budgeted for, but hadn't quite resourced completely. Many of them, this is what it took to really get them off the dime from that perspective because there was no longer the opportunity to wait. They needed to go and take care of this really critical component within their business. So what COVID I think has taught companies, taught all of us is how vulnerable even the largest companies, and most robust enterprises can be, those companies that had already begun their digital transformation, maybe even years ago, had already started that process and we're in a great position in their journey, they fared a lot better and we're able to be agile, we're able to shift priorities, we're able to go after what they needed to do to run their businesses better and be able to do so with real clarity and confidence. And I think that's really the second piece of it is for the last six months, people's lives have really depended on the data, people's lives have really depended on uncertainty. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of reliable and trustworthy information, not just the proliferation of data and as Chris mentioned, just data being available. It's really about making sure that you can use that data as an asset and that the greatest weapon we all have, really there is the information and good information to make great business decisions. Of course, Chris, the other thing we've seen is the acceleration to the cloud, which is obviously born in the cloud, it's been a real tailwind. What are you seeing in that regard from your, I was going to say in the field, but from your Zoom vantage point. Yeah. Well, I think AC talked about supply chain analytics in her previous example. And I think one of the things that we did is we hosted a data set, the COVID data set, COVID-19 data set within Snowflake's data marketplace. And we saw customers that were initially hesitant to move to the cloud, really accelerate their usage of Snowflake in the cloud with this COVID data set. And then we had other customers that are in the retail space, for example, and use the COVID data set to do supply chain analytics and accelerated, it helped them make smarter business decisions on that. So I'd say that COVID has made customers that maybe were maybe hesitant to start their journey in the cloud move faster. And I've seen that really go at a blistering pace right now. You know, AC, you just talked about value, because it's all about value, but the old days of data quality and the early days of chief data officer, all the focus was on risk avoidance. How do I get rid of data? How long do I have to keep it? And that has flipped dramatically, sometime during the last decade. You can't get away too much from the need for quality data and a governed data. I think that's the first step. You can't really get to trusted data without those components. And but to your point, the chief data officer's role, I would say has changed pretty significantly. And in the roundtables that I've participated in over the last several months, it's certainly a topic that they bring to the table that they'd like to chat with their peers about in terms of how they're navigating through the balance that they still need to manage to the quality. They still need to manage to the governance. They still need to ensure that they're delivering that trusted information to the business, but now on the flip side as well, they're being relied upon to bring new insights. And that's, and it's really requiring them to work more cross-functionally than they may have needed to in the past, where that's become a big part of their job is being that evangelist for data, the evangelist for those insights and being able to bring in new ideas for how the business can operate and identified, not just operational efficiencies, but revenue opportunities, ways that they can shift. All you need to do is take a look at, for example, retail. Retail was heavily impacted by the pandemic this year. And it shows how easily an industry can be, can be just to kind of thrown off its course, simply by just a significant change like that. And they need to be able to adjust. And this is where, when I've talked to some of the CDOs of the retail customers that we work with, they've had to really take a deep look at how they can leverage the data at their fingertips to identify new and different ways in which they can respond to customer demands. So it's a whole different dynamic for sure. It doesn't mean that you walk away from the other and the original part of the role or the areas in which they were maybe more defined a few years ago when the role of the chief data officer became very popular. I do believe it's more of a balance at this point and really being able to deliver great value to the organization with the insights that they can bring. Well, AC, stay on that for a second. So you have this concept of data health. And I guess what I'm kind of getting to add is that in the early days of big data, Hadoop, it was just a lot of rogue efforts going on. People realized, wow, there's no governance. And what seems like what Snowflake and Talender are trying to do is to make that so the business doesn't have to worry about it, build that in, don't bolt it on. But what's this notion of data health that you talk about? Companies can measure and do measure just about everything, every aspect of their business health. Except what's interesting is they don't have a great way to measure the health of their data. And this is an asset that they truly rely on, their future depends on, is that health of their data? And so if we take a little bit of a step back, maybe let's take a look at an example of a customer experience just to kind of make a little bit of a delineation between the differences of data quality, data trust and what data health truly is. We work with a lot of hotel chains. And like all companies today, hotels collect a ton of information. There's mounds of information, private information about their customers through the loyalty clubs and all the information that they collect from the front desk, the systems that store their data. You can start to imagine the amount of information that a hotel chain has about an individual. And frequently that information has errors in it such as duplicate entries. Is it AC gram or is it an incristillogram? Same person, slightly different depending on how I might have looked or how I might have checked in at the time. And sometimes the data is also mismanaged where because it's in so many different locations, it could be accessed by the wrong person or someone that wasn't necessarily intended to have that kind of visibility. And so these are examples of when you look at something like that, now you're starting to get into privacy regulations and other kinds of things that can be really impactful to a business if data is in the wrong hands or if the wrong data is in the wrong hands. So in a world of a misinformation and mistrust, which is around us every single day, talent has really invented a way for businesses to verify the veracity, the accuracy of their data. And that's where data health really comes in is being able to use a trust score to measure the data health. And that's what we've recently introduced as this concept of the trust score, something that can actually provide and measure the accuracy and the health of the data all the way down to an individual report. And we believe that that truly provides the explainable trust issue resolution, the kinds of things that companies are looking for in that next stage of overall data management. Thank you. Chris, bring us home. So one of the key aspects of what Snowflake is doing is building out the ecosystem. It's very, very important. We talked about how you guys are partnering and adding value in particular things that you're seeing customers do today within the ecosystem or with the help of the ecosystem in Snowflake that they weren't able to do previously. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, AC mentioned it, you mentioned it, you know, we spent, I spent a lot of my Zoom days talking to Chief Data Officers. And as I'm talking to these Chief Data Officers, that they are so concerned, their responsibility on making sure that the end, the business users are getting accurate data. So they view that as data governance as one aspect of it. But the other aspect is there's circumference of the data, of where it sits and who has access to that data and making sure it's super secure. And I think, you know, Snowflake is a tremendous landing spot being a data warehouse or a cloud data platform as a service. You know, we take care of all, you know, securing that data. And I think where Talon really helps our customer base is helps them exactly what, but as he talked about is making sure that, you know, myself as a business user, someone like myself who's looking at data all the time trying to make decisions on how many salespeople I wanna hire, how's my forecast coming, you know, how's the product working, all that stuff. I need to make sure that I'm actually looking at good data. And I think the combination of all sitting in a single repository like Snowflake and then layering it on top or layering a tool like Talon on top of it where I can actually say, yeah, that is good data. It helps me make smarter decisions faster. And ultimately I think that's really where the ecosystem plays an incredibly important role for Snowflake and our customers. Guys, two great guests. I wish we had more time, but we gotta go. And so thank you so much for sharing your perspectives. A great conversation.