 Hey everybody, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesars Forum, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, covering Snowflake Summit 22. This is day one, action packed. It kind of feels like we were shot out of a cannon, which is great. We love that at theCUBE. Our next guest from Slalom joins us, Hilary Fire, the GM of Data and Analytics. Hilary, it's great to have you on the program. It's great to be here, so excited to be here. It's great to be back in person. It is, it's amazing. It's like filling my cup just to be back with people again. I felt the same. And you could tell that on stage during the keynote, which was not only standing room only, but there was an overflow area. I was in the overflow room. I have to admit it. We had a breakfast meeting and we got there right on time and we ended up in overflow, but it was great. There was just great energy and it was exciting to see all the progress that's coming down the pipe. Tremendous progress, tremendous innovation, a lot of evolution, since we last saw Snowflake in person, which was 2019. Talk to us from Slalom's partnership perspective. How is data evolving? The use of data evolving, what are you hearing from the front lines of the customer? From the front lines of the customer, we're seeing a lot of customers go to the cloud and Snowflake's at the forefront of that evolution. We're seeing them take advantage of this separation of compute and storage to be able to scale to different levels and concurrency at different levels and collaborate. And we always say what we're actually seeing them unlock is this modern culture of data where people and organizations can fully take advantage at all different levels of this accessible but governed data. And I think Snowflake makes that a reality. So we go to a lot of events, of course, and you hear both sides of the story. When you talk to a company like Snowflake, you know, or one of the hyperscalers, it's like, yeah, cloud makes a ton of sense when you talk to some of the more established companies called them legacy companies. He goes, oh no, people are repatriating, they're moving back on prem or they can't move data, they won't move data in the cloud. The truth is probably some place in the middle, but when you look at the numbers, cloud is growing substantially faster. What are you seeing with customers with regard to modernization, the role of cloud and the role of Snowflake? I think they're flocking to the cloud. I think COVID had people flock there, right? You realize the agility it provides for you is unparalleled. And to some extent, I'd had conversations with customers years ago that they were like, hey, I know security, I do it better than anybody. And I go, honestly, AWS, Google, like the hyper cloud providers, they know security and Snowflake doing that data layer across all of them. They do security at a whole different level than any data center or any IT group that I've seen out there. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years where it's now no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when. How have you seen the security conversation elevate when you're talking with customers in terms of up the executive stack? Is that now something that it sees we? It's a top priority. It's a board priority. I can tell you last year, I actually spent time internally helping implement Snowflake for us at Slalom. And it's our president's top priority was security. And that was one of the reasons, honestly, that we went that way. We were a little out of date. We needed to modernize. We needed to migrate. And we wanted to practice what we preach with our customers. So we did a little bit of both. And we did more than technology. We did a lot of process change, a lot of people up leveling because we really feel like technology is only a piece of the puzzle. You have to bring the people along for the journey in order to make that a reality. So what was the business driver to make that change? I think it was honestly to empower more people. And then we also had the threat of systems that were falling over and just not meeting the needs of the business. We were pretty data-driven and the systems weren't keeping up. And they were on-prem systems? They were hosted in the cloud? They were kind of on-prem, kind of hosted in the cloud. They were SQL on EC2 instances. But we just, we weren't able to scale. Literally was falling over. Like, we have a day a week where all of the reporting comes out because we're time-driven. And it would fall over, literally. So you had a halfway house, sort of. Yeah. And then you moved much of it, most of it, all of it into Snowflakes. All of it into Snowflakes. All of it. And then some. Okay. Because we had certain systems that we were afraid, like Workday, right? All the PII, all the privacy data, we were afraid to bring that into our SQL server before. But we were able to bring that into Snowflake now. And it unlocks. In a governed, we have security in very compliant ways. We have a lot of interesting things that we've done in this past year to both empower more people but do it in a governed and secured way. And how long did that migration take? I'd say it took about a year. And it was... Pretty fast. It was a tough year, honestly. Yeah, it was an ugly migration. We do it with internal consultants. And some of them in the beginning of COVID, we looked at it as an opportunity, let's get them, let's do it internally. And then we got super busy. The market just took off. And then we were begging for resources. We were like, okay, where can we find somebody to help us with this? Cobbler's kids. Yeah, we were the Cobbler's kids. But we got it done. And as a partner drinking the Snowflake Champagne, talk to me about the ability to influence the technology, the direction, the roadmap. We've heard so much innovation announced this morning alone. Do you have that capability as a Snowflake partner? Yeah, for sure. So I feel like we're always on the forefront. We're doing these strategy projects with our clients. And so we want to keep our ears to what's going on in the innovation. We look at a lot of the other partners that are here. There's a whole ecosystem that's grown up around Snowflake. And it's amazing to see the advancements that are happening. And the cloud allows you to leapfrog just so quickly, the advancements. And we talked about this before we started that I've been in this data space for 30 years and it's changed a lot. The progression, the real-time data, what you can do, the separation of compute and storage. It's amazing what you can do and yet some of the same problems are pervasive. I have too much data, not enough information. And so we're seeing the advent of more governance and catalogs and that whole semantic layer is coming into play. Yeah, the bromide is data is plentiful, insights aren't. And then monetizing data is really, really hard. What's your take on Snowflake's ability to change that dynamic? I think they're making it a lot easier. I mean, some of the advancements are coming out with and more and more companies are looking to monetize. And we're doing that in partnership with some companies like Meredith Corporation. I don't know if you know who they are, but they're like all recipes.com if you go there, they collect a lot of that data. We have a partnership together where we're looking and they're on Snowflake and we're doing a joint data monetization offering out to customers. Snowflake and Solem have over 200 joint customers. Solem has one partner of the year now, five times, congratulations, why that? Thank you. What is the secret, what's the secret sauce? What does the future of the partnership look like given the flywheel that is Snowflake that is incredibly fast? Yeah, I think the secret sauce to me is we started early and we like the product, but we had a lot of core values in common. If you look, the customer obsession, do the right thing always, just get it done. Really very, very similar, and so that translates out in the field and that's why we team so well together. But at the end of the day, our secret sauce is we know the product. We invested really early in getting skilled up on Snowflake and we were the first partner to train the trainer and so we literally certified hundreds of folks on the product and we stay on the leading edge. And we're now working with their professional services arm to really take a joint offering to the market around helping organizations not just migrate, but really modernize, because that's when you truly take advantage of the cloud and some people were quick to migrate and they're not seeing those advantages and we want to make sure we're unlocking all the advantages of actually modernizing. What do you think last question is we are almost out of time here. What do you think in the 30 years you've said you've been in this business, you talked about the modern culture of data, what does it take for a legacy organization to pivot, to be able to pivot, to be able to adopt a modern culture of data if they're so used to old school processes? I think it's having someone with a bold vision at the top that's willing to say, hey, we want to go to the new frontier and then sticking to the guns and taking a holistic approach. Don't just put in technology, don't just change a process, but think about it holistically. We have a whole framework where we look at five different dimensions and we help our customers go through and maybe you don't want to get to the most mature stage across all five, but figure out where you want to get to and then start actually slogging it out and going step by step to get it done. And it's all about people, process and technology. Those three together are absolutely critical. It sure is. Excellent, Hilary, thank you for joining Dave and me on theCUBE talking about the Slalom partnership, what you're doing with Snowflake and on top of Snowflake, we appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage from Snowflake Summit 22, live from Las Vegas.