 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit 22 live from Las Vegas. We're at Caesar's Forum, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We've been having some great conversations over the last day and a half. This guy just came from main stage interviewing the CEO, Frank Slubin himself, who joins us after our next guest here. We're going to be talking customers and successes with Snowflake. Rosemary Huah joins us, the global head of retail at Snowflake. And Patrick Kelly, the VP of Product Management at their customer, 8451. Welcome to the program, guys. Thank you. It's nice to be here. So Patrick, 8451. Talk to us about the business. Give the audience an overview of what you guys are doing and then we'll talk about how you're working with Snowflake. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for the opportunity to be here. So 8451 is a retail data science, insights and media company. And really what that means is that we partner with our parent company, Kroger, as well as consumer packaged goods or brands and brokers and agencies really to understand shoppers and create relevant personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers in stores and grocery stores. That relevance is key. We all expect that these days. I think the last couple of years as everyone's patience has been wearing very thin. I'm not convinced it's going to come back either, but we expect that brands are going to interact with us and offer us the next best offer that's actually relevant and personalized to us. How does 8451 achieve that? It's a great question and you're right. That expectation is only growing and it takes data, analytics, data science and all of these capabilities in order to deliver it on that promise. You know, a big part of the relationship that retailers and brands have with consumers is about a value exchange. And it's again, it's about that expectation that brands and retailers need to be able to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers. Whether that be introducing new brands or offering the right price points or promotions or ensuring you meet them where they are. Whether it be online, which has obviously been catalyzed by the pandemic over the last two years, or in store. So, a deep understanding of the customer, which is founded in data and the appropriate analytics and science. And then the collaboration, back with the retailers and the brands so that you can bring that experience to life. Again, that could be a price point on the shelf or it could be a personalized email or website interaction that delivers the right experience for the consumer so they can see that value and really build loyalty. In the right time, in real time. That's right. I love the concept of the actual platform, the retail data cloud. It's so unique for a technology company. Snowflake's a technology company. You see services companies do it all the time, but to actually transform what was considered a data warehouse from the cloud to a platform for data, I call it SuperCloud. Tell us how this came about, how you were able to actually develop this and where you are in that journey. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a big focus on data sharing. We saw that that's how our customers are interacting with each other is using our data sharing functionality to really bring that ecosystem to life. So that's retailers sharing with their consumer products companies selling through those retailers and then of course the data service companies that are kind of helping both sides. And that data sharing functionality is the kind of under fabric for the data cloud. Where we bring in partners, we bring in customers and we bring in tech solutions to the table and customers can use the data cloud not only with the powered by partners that we have, but also the data marketplace, getting that data in real time and making some business value out of that data. So that's really the big focus of Snowflake is investing in industry to realize the business value. And talk about the ecosystem and how important that is, where you leave off and the ecosystem picks up and how that's evolving. Absolutely. I'm sure you can join in on this, but definitely that collaboration between retailers and CPGs, right? I mean retailers have that rich first party customer data, they see all those transactions, they see when people are shopping and then the brands really need that first party data to figure out how their customers are interacting with their brand. And so that collaborative nature, that makes up the ecosystem and of course you've got the tech partners in the middle that are kind of providing enriched data assets as well. You guys at 84.51 are a huge part of that ecosystem being one of the key retailers in the United States. Have you been seeing that as well with your brands? Yeah, absolutely. Data and data science has always been core to the identity of 84.51. And historically, a lot of the interaction that we have with brands were through report web-based applications, right? And it's a really great seamless way to deliver insights to non-technical users. But as the entire market has really started to invest in data and data science and technology and capabilities, we launched a collaborative cloud last year and it was really an opportunity for us to reimagine what that experience would look like and to ensure that we were meeting the evolving needs of the industry. And as Rosemary pointed out, data sharing is table stakes, right? It's a capability that you don't want to have to think about. You want to be thinking about the strategic initiatives, the science that you're going to create in order to drive action and personalize experiences. So what we found at 84.51 is really investing in our collaborative cloud and working with leading technology providers like Snowflake to make that seamless has been the unlock to ensure that data and data science can be a competitive advantage for our clients and partners, not just the retailer in 84.51. Is the collaborative cloud built on Snowflake? Yeah, so the collaborative cloud is really about ensuring that data sharing through Snowflake is done seamlessly. So we've invited our clients and partners to build their own science on 84.51's first party data asset through Kroger. And our data represents 60 million households, half the United States, two billion transactions annually. The robustness of that data asset and its analysis ready is so impactful to the investment that brands can make in their own data science efforts because brands want to invest in data science not to do data work, not to do cleaning and munging and merging and standardizing. They want to do analysis that's going to impact the strategies and ultimately the shopper's lives. So again, we're able to leverage the capabilities of Snowflake to ensure data sharing is not part of our day-to-day conversation. Data sharing is something we can take for granted so that we can talk about the shopper and our strategies. So this is why I call it super cloud. So Jerry Chen wrote an article, Castles in the Cloud, and in there he said, he called it sub-clouds. And I'm like, no. By the way, great article, Jerry's brilliant. But so you got AWS, you built on top of AWS. You got the Snowflake data cloud, you were building on top of that. And I was sitting at the table and my kid goes, this is super. I'm like, ah, super clouds. I didn't really even coin it. And then I realized somebody else had used it before. But that is different. It's new. And it's around data. It's around vertical industries. I get a lot of heat for that term. But I feel like this, look around this industry. Everybody's doing that. That is digital transformation. Don't you see that with your customers? Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of different industry trends where you can't use your own historical first-party data to figure out what customers are doing. I mean, with COVID, customers are behaving totally differently than they used to. And you can't use your historical data to predict out of stocks or how the customer is going to be interacting with your brand anymore. And you need that third-party macroeconomic data. You need that third-party COVID data or foot traffic data to enrich what your businesses are doing. And so, yes, it is a super cloud. And I think the big differentiator is that we are cloud-economic, meaning that, like you said, you can take the technology for granted. You don't have to worry about where the other person has their tech stack. It's all the same experience on the Snowflake super cloud, as you put it. So Patrick, talk about the impact that you have been able to have during COVID. I mean, everybody had supply chain issues, but if you took away the machine learning and the data science that you're initiating, would life have been harder? Do you have data on that? What if we didn't have this capability during the challenges? No, it's a fantastic question. And I'll actually build on the example that Rosemary offered around COVID and better understanding COVID. So in the past, when we talk about data sharing, data collaboration, it basically wasn't possible. What's your tech stack, what's mine? How do we share data? I don't want to send you my data without releasing governance. It was a non-starter. And through technology like Snowflake, as we've launched the collaborative cloud, we actually had a pilot client start right at the beginning of 2020. We had, you know, expect out a bunch of use cases that were really impactful for their organization. But of course, what happened is a pandemic at us. And it became the biggest question. CEO executive team all the way down is, what is happening? What is happening in our stores? How are shoppers behaving? And what that client of ours came to realize is, well, we actually, we have access to the E451 collaborative cloud. We can see half of America's behavior last week down to the basket, transaction UPC level. Let's get going. So again, the conversation wasn't about, you know, what data sources? How do we scramble? How do we get together? What technologies? How do we collaborate? It was immediately focused on building the analysis to better understand that. And the outcomes that drove actually were all the way from manufacturing impact to marketing to merchandising, because that brand was able to figure out, hey, our top selling products, they're not on the shelves. What are shoppers doing? Are they going to another brand? Are they not buying it all together? Are they going to a different size? Are they staying within our product portfolio? Are they going to a competitor? Those insights drove everything again from, what do we need to manufacture more to? How do we need to communicate and incent our shoppers, our loyal shoppers? Also, what's happening to our non-loyals? Are they looking for an alternative and a need that we can serve? That level of shopper and customer understanding going all the way up to strategic initiatives is something that is enabled through the super cloud. How do you facilitate privacy as we're seeing this proliferation of privacy legislation? I think there's now 22 states that have individual and California is changing to CPRA at the beginning of January 23. How do you balance that ability to share data equitably fast, quickly, but also balance consumer privacy environments? I mean, I could take a stab first. I mean, at Snowflake, right? There is no better place to share your data that in a governed way than with Snowflake data sharing because then you can see and understand how the other side is using your data. Whereas in traditional methods using an API or using an FTP server, you wouldn't be able to actually see how the other side is using your data. But in addition to that, we have the clean room where you can actually join on that underlying PII data without exposing it because you can share functions securely on both sides. So I think there is no better place to do it than here at Snowflake. And because we deeply understand those policies, I think we are kind of keeping up with the times, trying to get in front of things so that our data sharing capabilities stay up to date when you have to expunge records, identify records with CCPA and GDPR and all the rest that are coming. And so, I mean, I think especially with 84.51's collaborative cloud, also building on top of the clean room in the further roadmap, I think you're going to see some of that privacy-compliant data sharing coming to play as well. You know, it's interesting, Patrick, because we were just in that session with the Frank Q&A and he was very candid about when he was talking about Apache, I'm sorry, Apache iceberg. Yeah, yes. And he basically flat out said, look, you got to put it into the Snowflake data cloud. It's better there, but people might want to put it outside, not get locked in, et cetera. But what I'm listening to you saying, it's so much easier for you today. That could evolve, something open source. And how do you think about that in terms of placing your bets? Yeah, it's a great question. And really to go back to privacy as a total topic. I mean, you're right. It's an extremely relevant topic. It's very ever-changing right now. At 84.51, privacy is first. It's the foundation. It's table stakes. And that's from a policy, it's from a governance, it's from a technology capability standpoint. And it's part of our culture because it has to be. And so when we think about the products that we're going to build, how we want to implement, it's a requirement that we leverage technologies that enable us to secure the governance and ensure that we're privacy compliant. The customer-related asset that we have is extremely valuable as we've talked about in this interview. It's also responsibility. And we take that very, very seriously. And so Dave, back to your question about decisions to go open source or leverage for technologies. There's always a balance. We love to push the bounds of innovation and we want to be on the forefront of data sharing, data science collaboration for this industry. But at the same time, we balance that with making sure that our technology partners are the right ones. Because we are not willing to compromise our governance and our privacy priorities. That's going to be interesting to see how that evolves. And I loved that Frank was so candid about it. I think the key for any cloud player, including a super cloud is you've got to have an ecosystem without an ecosystem, forget it. And you see a lot of companies, I mean we were at Dell Tech World, they're kind of, they're at the beginnings of that. But the ecosystems, nothing like this, which is amazing, nothing against Dell, they're just kind of getting started. And you have to be open, you have to have optionality. So I don't know if we'll see the day where they're including data bricks, data lakes inside of the snowflake cloud, that will be amazing. But you never say never in the world of cloud, do you? Stranger things. Rosemary and Patrick, thank you so much for joining us talking about what 84.51 is doing powered by a snowflake. And also the rise of the snowflake retail cloud and what that's doing. We'll have to have you back on to hear what's going on as I'm sure the adoption will continue to increase. Absolutely, thank you so much to you both for having us. Our pleasure, thank you. For our guests, I'm Lisa Martin, he's Dave Vellante. Stick around, Dave will be back with Frank Slutman, CEO of Snowflake Next. You won't want to miss it.