 Hello, everybody. And welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit 2020. We're tracking the rise of the data cloud and fresh off the keynotes here, Frank Slutman, the chairman and CEO of Snowflake and Anita Lynch, the vice president of data governance at Disney Streaming Services, folks, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Dave. Anita, Disney Plus, awesome. You know, we signed up early, watched all the Marvel movies, Hamilton, the new Pixar movie, Soul. I haven't gotten into the Mandalorian yet, your favorite, but really appreciate you guys coming on. Let me start with Frank. I'm glad you're putting forth this vision around the data cloud, because I never liked the term enterprise data warehouse. What you're doing is so different from the sort of that legacy world that I've known all these years, but start with why the data cloud, what problems are you trying to solve? And maybe some of the harder challenges you're seeing. Yeah, you know, we have, we've come a long way in terms of workload execution, right? In terms of scale and performance and, you know, concurrent execution, we've really taken the lid off sort of the physical constraints that have existed on these types of operations. But there's one problem that we're not yet solving, and that is the siloing and bunkering of data. Essentially, you know, data is locked in applications, it's locked in data centers, it's locked in cloud, cloud regions. Incredibly hard for data science teams to really, you know, unlock the true value of data when you can't address patterns that exist across data sets. So we'll perpetuate a status we've had for ever since the beginning of computing if we don't start to crack that problem now. We have that opportunity, but the notion of a data cloud is like basically saying, look folks, you know, we have to start on siloing and unlocking the data and bring it into a place, you know, where we can access it, you know, across all these parameters and boundaries that have historically existed. It's very much a step-level function. Customers have always looked at things one workload at a time. That mentality really has to go. You really have to have a data cloud mentality as well as a workload orientation towards managing data. Anita, it was great hearing your role at Disney and your keynote and the work you're doing, the governance work, and you're serving a great number of stakeholders enabling things like data sharing. You got really laser focused on trust, compliance, privacy. This idea of a data clean room is really interesting. You know, maybe you can expand on some of these initiatives here and share what you're seeing as some of the biggest challenges to success. And of course the opportunities that you're unlocking. Sure. I mean, in my role leading data governance, it's really critical to make sure that all of our stakeholders not only know what data is available and accessible to them, they can also understand really easily and quickly whether or not the data that they're using is for the appropriate use case. And so that's a big part of how we scale data governance. And a lot of the work that we would normally have to do manually is actually done for us through the data clean rooms. Thank you for that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the role of data and how your data strategy has evolved and maybe discuss some of the things that Frank mentioned about data silos. Obviously you can relate to that having been in the data business for a while but I wonder if you can elucidate on that. Sure. I mean, data complexities are going to evolve over time in any traditional data architecture simply because you often have different teams at different periods in time trying to analyze and gather data across a whole lot of different sources. And the complexity that just arises out of that is due to the different needs of specific stakeholders, their time constraints, and quite often it's not always clear how much value they're gonna be able to extract from the data at the outset. So what we've tried to do to help break down those silos is allow individuals to see upfront how much value they're gonna get from the data by knowing that it's trustworthy right away, by knowing that it's something that they can use in their specific use case right away. And by ensuring that essentially as they're continuing to kind of scale the use cases that they're focused on, they're no longer required to make multiple copies of the data, do multiple steps to reprocess the data, and that makes all the difference in the world. For sure, I'm a copy creep because it'd be a silent killer. Frank, I've followed you for a number of years. You're a big thinker, you and I have had a lot of conversations about the near-term, mid-term, and long-term. I wonder if you could talk about, when you're keynote, you talk about eliminating silos and connecting across data sources, which is a really powerful concept, but really only if people are willing and able to connect and collaborate. Where do you see that happening? Maybe what are some of the blockers there? Well, there's certainly a natural friction there. I still remember when we first started to talk to Salesforce, they had discovered that we were a top three destination of Salesforce data and they were wondering why that was, and the reason is, of course, that people take Salesforce data, push it to Snowflake because they wanna overlay it with data outside of Salesforce, whether it's Adobe or any other type of marketing data set, and then they wanna run very highly-scaled processes on it. But the reflexes in the world of SaaS is always like, no, we're an island, we're a planet onto ourselves. Everybody needs to come with us, as opposed to we go to a different platform to run these type of processes. It's no different for the public cloud vendor. They have massive moats around their storage to really prevent data from leaving their orbit. So there is natural friction in terms of for this to happen, but on the other hand, there is an enormous need. We can't deliver on the power and potential of data unless we allow it to come together. Snowflake is the platform that allows that to happen. We were pleased with our relationship with Salesforce because they did appreciate why this was important and why this was necessary, and we think other parts of the industry will gradually come around to it as well. So the idea of a data cloud has really come, right? People are recognizing why this matters. Now, it's not gonna happen overnight. It is a step-level function, a very big change in mentality and orientation. Yeah, it's almost as though the classification of our industry sort of repeated some of the application silos and you build a hard and top around it, all the processes are hard and around it, and okay, here we go, and you're really trying to break that, aren't you? Yep, exactly. Anita, again, I wanna come back to this notion of governance. It's so important. It's the first role in your title and it really underscores the importance of this. Frank was just talking about some of the hurdles and this is a big one. I mean, we saw this in the early days of big data where governance was this afterthought it was like bolted on kind of wild, wild west. I'm interested in your governance journey and maybe you can share a little bit about what role Snowflake has played there in terms of supporting that agenda and kind of what's next on that journey. Sure, well, I've led data teams in numerous ways over my career. This is the first time that I've actually had the opportunity to focus on governance and what it's done is allowed for my organization to scale much more rapidly and that's so critically important for our overall strategy as a company. Well, I mean, a big part of what you were talking about at least my inference in your talk was really that the business folks didn't have to care about, wonder about, they cared about it but they don't have to wonder about about the privacy, the concerns, et cetera. You've taken care of all that. It's sort of transparent to them. Is that right? That's right, absolutely. So we focus on ensuring compliance across all of the different regions where we operate. We also partner very heavily with our legal and information security teams. They're critical to ensuring that we're able to do this. We don't do it alone but governance includes not just the compliance and the privacy, it's also about data access and it's also about ensuring data quality. And so all of that comes together under the governance umbrella. I also lead teams that focus on things like instrumentation which is how we collect data. We focus on the infrastructure and making sure that we are protected for scale and all of these are really important components of our strategy. So I have a question maybe each of you can answer. I sort of see our industry moving from products to then to platforms and platforms even evolving into ecosystems. And then there's this ecosystem of data. You guys both talked a lot about data sharing but maybe Frank, you can start and Edie, you can add on to Frank's answer. You're obviously both passionate about the use of data and trying to do so in a responsible way. That's critical but it's also going to have business impact. Frank, where's this passion come from on your side and how are you putting into action in your own organization? Well, I'm really going to date myself here but many, many years ago, I saw the first glimpse of multi-dimensional databases that were used for reporting really on IBM mainframes and it was extraordinarily difficult. We didn't even have the words back then in terms of data warehouses all these terms didn't exist. People just knew that they wanted to have a more flexible way of reporting and being able to pivot data dimensionally and all these kinds of things. And I just, whatever, this predates Windows 3.1 which really set off the whole sort of graphical way of dealing with systems which there's not whole generations of people that don't know any different, right? So I've lived the pain of this problem and sort of had a front row seat to watching this transpire over a very long period of time and that's one of the reasons why I'm here because I've finally seen a glimpse of us as an industry fully, fully unleashing and unlocking the potential. We're now in a place where the technology is ahead of people's ability to harness it, right? Which we've never been there before, right? It was always like we wanted to do things that technology wouldn't let us. It's different now. I mean, people are just, their heads are spinning with what's now possible, which is why you see markets evolve very rapidly right now. We were talking earlier about how you can't take past definitions and concepts and apply them to what's going on in the world. The world's changing right in front of your eyes right now. So Anita, maybe you could add on to what Frank just said and share some of the business impacts and outcomes that are notable since you've really applied your love of data and maybe touch on culture, your data culture, any words of wisdom for folks in the audience who might be thinking about embarking on a data cloud journey similar to what you've been on. Yeah, sure. I think for me, I fell in love with technology first and then I fell in love with data. And I fell in love with data because of the impact that data can have on both the business and the technology strategy. And so it's sort of that nexus between all three and in terms of my career journey and some of the impacts that I've seen. I mean, I think with the advent of the cloud, before, well, how do I say this? Before the cloud actually became so prevalent and such a common part of the strategy that's required, it was so difficult, so painful. It took so many hours to actually be able to calculate the volumes of data that we had. Now we have that accessibility and then on top of it with the Snowflake data cloud, it's much more performance oriented from a cost perspective because you don't have multiple copies of the data or at least you don't have to have multiple copies of the data. And I think moving beyond some of the traditional mechanisms for measuring business impact has only been possible with the volumes of data that we have available to us today. And it's just, it's phenomenal to see the speed at which we can operate and really truly understand our customer's interests and their preferences and then tailor the experiences that they really want and deserve for them. It's been a great feeling to get to this point in time. That's fantastic. Frank, I got to ask you, so in your spare time you decided to write a book, I'm loving it. I don't have a signed copy, so I'm going to have to send it back and have you sign it, and I love the inside baseball, it's just awesome. So really appreciate that. So, but why did you decide to write a book? Well, there were a couple of reasons, obviously we thought of as an interesting tale to tell for anybody who was interested in what's going on, how did this come about, who are the characters behind the scenes and all this kind of stuff. But from a business standpoint, because this is such a step function, it's so non-incremental, we felt like we really needed quite a bit of real estate to really lay out what the full narrative and context is. And we thought the books titled The Rise of the Data Cloud, that's exactly what it is. And we're trying to make the case for that mindset, that mentality, that strategy, because otherwise, I think as an industry we're at risk of persisting, perpetuating where we've been since the beginning of computing. So we're really trying to make a pretty forceful case for a look, there's an enormous opportunity out there, but there's some choices you have to make along the way. Guys, we got to leave it there. Frank, I know you and I are going to talk again. Anita, I hope we have a chance to meet face to face and talk in theCUBE live someday. You're a phenomenal guest and what a great story. Thank you both for coming on. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on theCUBE.