 Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit Live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we have had an action-packed two days here talking with loads of folks. There's been about 10,000 attendees here. The momentum, the excitement for Snowflake, what they're building, what they've announced, is huge. I tell you, this is a getaway day and there's still a decent amount of buzz going on in the ecosystem here and the exhibit hall. And I was just saying, when you walk around Las Vegas, you'd never know the economy's about to tank. Inflation is on the rise. I mean, Vegas is packed. It is packed. A lot of shows going on here. We're excited to welcome Patrick Bartsch, the Senior Director of Product Management at Capital One Software to the program. Patrick, it's great to have you. Thank you, it's great to be here. So we all know Capital One. I love the commercials. I'm sure you have a large say in how fun and creative they are. Talk to us about Capital One Software. This is a new business, software business. It is. So from our founding days in 1994, Capital One has always recognized the power of data and technology to create differentiated experiences for our customers. But about 10 years ago, we declared that we were going to reinvent the way that we build and use technology. One of the key steps in that journey was migrating from our owned and operated data centers to the public cloud. But in order to do that, we needed to build a number of products and platforms to help us operate at scale because the market just wasn't quite there yet. And so Capital One Software, which we announced last week, woo-hoo, is our first foray into bringing some of those cloud and data management products to market. Talk to us about you, Capital One is one of Snowflake's longest running and largest customers. How does Snowflake help facilitate that? Couple different ways. So first, Snowflake is a, it's a super powerful platform. They've changed the game when it comes to leveraging data at scale in the cloud. We were an early investor. We were one of their biggest customers. They've been a great partner along the way, helping us adopt the platform. But for us, when we adopted back in 2018-ish, we realized that with all of this power comes a lot of responsibility. And so we needed to make sure that we were putting good governance and good controls around our usage of Snowflake from the start. And so we needed to build some tools to help us optimize our usage of Snowflake. Okay, so you basically said we're going all in the cloud. You guys have made huge investments in AWS and obviously Snowflake. And then now you're sort of taking what you did internally and exposing it, almost like Amazon did, Amazon retail, and then that's how AWS was born. Okay, awesome. What kind of results did you see internally in terms of, the primary benefit if I understand it is cost savings, but also better data management, right? Is that fair? So the totality of what we've built internally covers both cost savings, data management, data security, adherence to data privacy legislation. The product that we announced here at Summit is really focused on cost optimization for Snowflake. And so with these tools, we've been able to save about 27% on our projected Snowflake costs. We've been able to save our teams about 50,000 hours of manual effort by reducing the number of change orders that they have to execute manually through automated infrastructure management. We've reduced our cost per query by about 43%. And so really what these enabled us to do is just get really efficient with how we use the system. You know, one of the challenges you might run into with Snowflake is unexpected costs. And so by leveraging these tools, we've been able to make sure that our costs are predictable and consistent from month to month, which enables us to budget appropriately. And that's 50,000 hours, person hours over what period of time? I have to get back to you on the exact amount of years, months, several years. Yeah, okay. So we're talking about tens and tens of millions of dollars, right? I mean, just assume a hundred bucks an hour for a person, just fully loaded, right? I mean, I'll just do that math. Okay, and 20% percent of Snowflake costs, so here's the question. Well, first of all, what's the vision? What's the, like, give me a five-year vision for the software group at Capital One. We want to bring Capital One's data and cloud management expertise to the masses. We've spoken to a number of companies that are trying to follow in our footsteps. We've heard again and again that our challenges are their challenges. Our, the path that we walked is the path that they're trying to walk, and so we are super excited about bringing all of our expertise to the market. So start with cost savings, but the vision transcends cost savings. Absolutely. Going into security, privacy, data management, workflow. Absolutely, absolutely. And the industry's in a super interesting place now where it's very fragmented. There's a galaxy of tools out there. You look around here. There's hundreds and hundreds of different solutions, but they're point solutions. They're all going after an individual piece of the management puzzle. And what we found was that we needed to create these integrated experiences that were aligned to our team's jobs to be done, not necessarily in terms of a capability like cataloging or quality or entitlements. In order to efficiently operate at scale, you need to string those things together in a way that lets your team get their job done. So my last question on this flow is, I don't feel familiar with, you guys may be familiar with Sarah Wong and Martin Casado published a piece that got a pretty wide viewing and discussion. They were out of Andreessen, a 16Z, that the cost of goods sold for SaaS companies who are born in the cloud are going to become so overwhelming that they're going to repatriate and start managing themselves. And they use Dropbox as an example. Now Dropbox is storage, so it's very specific niche, you know? And I've talked to many, many companies like Snowflake about this, and they're like, I ain't happening anytime soon. How do you feel about that? Because if you look at SaaS companies that are born in the cloud, their gross margins, they don't get to 90%, but they're healthy, 75, sometimes 78%. Even Snowflake's end of decade forecast, Scarpelli has it, I think it's 78%. And the reason that's not higher is because of the cloud cost. You're going to pay the cloud bills. My belief, and I've argued this, is that's okay. I can negotiate cloud bills. I can work with tools like yours over time to keep those down, and the cloud guys are going to be competing with each other. But what do you make of that, Patrick? Cloud costs aren't going to go down. Data is expanding at an exponential rate. The scale of data today is orders of magnitude versus what it was in on-prem systems. And so, I don't think the cloud providers are too worried because data is exploding at such a crazy pace. And so it really becomes about using all of those resources as efficiently as possible. And in the cloud where compute is fully elastic, it scales infinitely, instantly on-demand. It's all about making sure that if you're spending more, you're getting more business value, there's not wastage in the system. Same question, but different. Do you feel like strategically, organizations generally in Capital One specifically will optimize their time on optimizing or spend their effort optimizing the cloud costs? Or do you feel like long-term, you can actually be cheaper to manage yourself? In other words, are cloud benefits of not doing all that heavy lifting offset that potential cost equation? I mean, you saved just so much time and effort and headache, not having to manage physical infrastructure. And so like, snowflake, you can write a SQL command to create a database. You can write a SQL command to create a data warehouse. The market will not give up that level of simplicity for managing infrastructure. And so I think at the end of the day, you're going to see a focus on efficiency because what you really want your teams to be focused on, your old DBA and data engineering teams is focused on driving customer value, not in the weeds of infrastructure management. And that's why I think you guys, this is a great business that you're starting. I think, frankly, I think you're going to get a lot of competition, which is a good thing. It says you're in a great business and you guys are first. Talk about the customer experience. You know, we're also, as consumers, demanding. We want to be able to transact ASAP. We want to make sure that, you know, on the swipe fraud detection happens. How does the Slingshot help facilitate and improve the customer experience if I'm transacting or I'm going to sign up or I'm getting a mortgage? And so with Slingshot, we enable your company, regardless of what you do, at Capital One we're a bank, to build more personalized experiences for customers in a more cost-effective way. And so Eno is our intelligent personal banking assistant. With Snowflake, we're able Eno to do way more than we were previously for less than we would have without some of these tools. And that's a huge competitive differentiator because we expect as consumers of whatever it is, we want a personalized experience that's relevant, that's going to offer us products and services that might build upon what we've already done. It's kind of table stakes these days. And so with these tools and with Snowflake, we were able to, our business teams were able to onboard over 400 new use cases over that same time period. And so really what it's enabled us to do is unlock the innovative power of our company and create more of these customer experiences. How does the customer visualize those cost savings? And do you have some tooling? Maybe it's in the works to help them predict what kind of cost savings they have based on some modeling that you do? Absolutely. So we enable teams to enforce good governance around infrastructure management upfront by building rules and enabling their teams to create warehouses, create databases. And then once that infrastructure is up and running, we give them a whole bunch of dashboards that show transparency and to spend. We enable charge backs to lines of business. In today's consumption driven business models, it's hard to reconcile at the end of the month if you spent what you thought you spent and data costs have gone from cap X to op X. But not everybody is an expert. And so we look at usage data, we look at usage history and we come up with recommendations for how you can save money by tweaking this or tweaking that or better optimizing your compute. Should we expect you as you expand your opportunity to take your expertise and aim it at AWS more broadly, maybe Redshift more specifically, Google, GCP, BigQuery, Azure, what should we expect there? There's a lot of opportunity to help companies optimize costs across other cloud providers as well. This concept of elastic compute isn't just specific to snowflake. That's certainly one path that we could go down. We have a lot of expertise in data management as well and data privacy, data security. And so that's another path as well that we have expertise in. And so I think it's an exciting time. We're in an exciting place, but it's early days. Did you do a working backwards document? Can you share that with us? Fortunately not. Five or 10 years down the road, you may decide to do that, right? Yeah, let me check with my PR person to see if I'm allowed to share here. I mean, I think this is gonna be a huge success. And I think it follows a lot of the things that we've learned from AWS. You guys have been all in there and it's funny, right? We laugh about working backwards, customer obsession, two-piece of teams. I mean, it really has changed the sort of way that we think about developing software and managing infrastructures. I think you're going to have a huge business and I wish you the best. I appreciate that. And the thing I'll add to that statement is, internal teams are now starting to demand consumer-grade experiences for the tools that they use. And so one of the things that we did was treat our internal associates like they were external customers. We applied design thinking. We applied product management. We built our experience in terms of what are you trying to accomplish and what's getting in your way? Because that's what people have come to expect with all of these consumer experiences. Collaboration. That's right. Last question for you. What would you say to peers in your, whatever, in the same industry, other industries that are really trying to figure out how to get their hands on data to become a data company? What would you advise them? Why should they choose Snowflake? Snowflake gives you so many building blocks out of the box to help you create a well-managed data ecosystem. The simplicity with which you can create new infrastructure, define policies for that infrastructure, onboard new users. I mean, it's one of the platforms in internally Capital One that has the highest NPS score. And so if you're looking to adopt a data cloud platform, I mean, Snowflake is certainly high up on the list of what you should be looking at. Awesome. Do you consider this a SaaS? Is it a consumption? How do you price for this? So we don't have published pricing at the moment, but it is a SaaS product. What we can share is that it'll be a small fraction of your total credit spend with Snowflake. And you're thinking a subscription or you haven't figured that out yet? It'll likely be a consumption model based on, you know. Okay. So I say, you know, it's funny, SaaS, I get it, software is a service. But because it's consumption, I think it's like modern SaaS, if I can say that. You know, it's cloud-based SaaS. And it's more important to make sure right now, because we're so early that we're actually providing the right value to customers. We have a pretty generous trial program going on right now where you can try the software out for free to make sure it fits your needs. Okay, so you're in trial, I should have clarified that. You're in trial now. And so yeah, of course you haven't figured out exactly how you're going to price it yet. The official posture that we're taking is public preview. We've been in private preview for the last six months. We've onboarded a couple of customers who are starting to use the product. And so the big announcement this week is we're officially in public preview, come on in. So you got to get product market fit before you figure out your pricing and before you then you're going to scale. Great. What's been the feedback so far? Ha ha ha. Overwhelmingly positive. Somebody stopped by the booth and said, oh my God, that's so cool. We've heard a lot of, wow, we need this right now. I had pretty high expectations coming in just based on the value that this has created for Capital One but I've been blown away by what I've heard from the people who've stopped by our booth. Awesome. Patrick, thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what you're doing with Capital One software. Seems like you're just in early innings but so much potential to come. We wish you the best of luck with that and we have to come back and tell us how it's going. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, our day three coverage of Snowflake Summit 22 live from Las Vegas continues after a short break.