 Hey, Sudama, great to see you. Welcome to the Data Cloud Summit. Super excited to have you. Welcome. Hey, Chris. Very nice to be there. Thank you for having me there. Tell us a little bit about Allianz Benelux. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Allianz Benelux. Allianz Benelux is basically the Allianz business in the region of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We serve the needs of the customer here by securing the future. We actually do both PNC, as we call it, property and casualty in life, investment, management, and health. We do retail, small and medium enterprises. I am a regional chief data analytics officer for Allianz Benelux. I report directly to the regional CEO. My job here in Allianz is to basically drive the data and analytics agenda for Allianz Benelux. Sudamon, I understand you're getting your PhD in data science. It would be great for the audience to learn a little bit more about what's driving you to do that and what's most interesting to you about data science, AI, ML. The reason why I started to do this is because there is so much relevance push that which is basically driving the agenda. We need to really look at the theoretical part of it as well to kind of concretize and to bring in a certain level of dependency, consistency, timelessness, et cetera. And obviously, that which we are doing is very innovative here at Allianz Benelux, driven again by relevance, and which is very good for the business. But the timelessness needs to also be the sustainability. The scalability needs also has to be given to this particular Allianz-driven topic so that we don't just create a superficial impact, but we create a long-lasting and everlasting impact in our competitive intelligence that we build in Allianz Benelux. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. So I think, Sudamon, when you and I met back in March, one of the big things that you were considering is signing up with Snowflake and becoming a customer. But part of that journey was convincing Allianz Benelux to move to the cloud in your journey. So it would be great for you to explain to the audience what that journey has been like. Was it hard to convince your organization to move to the cloud? What hurdles might you have seen in your journey to the cloud? It was not very different to any kind of a change and the kind of effort that you need to put in a change for a normal status quo setup that which exists today. So of course, in any kind of a change or a status quo change or a challenge that which you bring in, there is a considerable effort that you need to put in. And it's also your responsibility to basically do that because if you don't have that energy or if you don't have that commitment and you are not able to sustain the energy or the commitment that you show in the new agenda that you bring in, then probably you're not gonna be there to see the change through. Of course, it was difficult obviously because there is already existing status quo and there we have a lot of benefits by moving to cloud and obviously the benefit seems very interesting but there is skepticism and we as Allianz from a group perspective and Benelux perspective as well are very, very clear on a point that we cannot take advantage of the data that which we have we want to ensure that privacy is by design, security is by design and we give utmost care to our customer data and all of this basically brings into the concept of, okay, what is it about moving to the cloud and where are we getting exposed? Where should we basically put together a security by design privacy but there's some kind of concepts before we do it and etc, are we ready? Can we ensure that we still keep the customer's data at a place where we basically can trust? Those are the things that which had to be explained. Certain level of sensitivization had to be created. Certain level of awareness, then the consideration part and yeah, all of this basically takes its own cycle. Awesome, thanks for sharing that. So we're super excited to call Allianz Benelux a customer now. What are you excited about with Snowflake and I know that you're looking at Snowflake as this kind of data cloud and data cloud transformation project. Tell us a little bit more about what excites you about Snowflake, how you think you might use Snowflake in this kind of transformation of Allianz Benelux. I know that Snowflake is brought to us as a product by you guys but we look at Snowflake as a kind of a message. We are breaking down the silos literally and we look at Snowflake as a kind of an agent to do this. This is something that which is very important to understand that whatever you do with the organizational level, you still end up with a situation where you kind of reinforce the silos. With Snowflake, we have an opportunity here to even challenge that and break the data silos. Once the data silos is broke, you basically improve the findability of data. You basically improve the understandability of the data, accessibility of the data, interpretability and everyone sees pretty much the same truth and that's how the silos disappear. We're very, very excited about the journey that which we have in front of us. Of course we have pretty new in it in the sense that we are going to have a very exciting journey as we progress. We are also looking forward to see how Snowflake's road map is going to take us to the point of arrival as I would call it in our own data driven journey. Today we live in this kind of multi-cloud, multi-cloud application world. What are some of the concerns you have as you transition from having stuff in a data center to using multiple clouds, to using multiple tools? What's some of the challenges you foresee having? What are the things that you're looking for from Snowflake to help you in that journey? There is always a reason why we basically make a change and the reason is always mostly towards more efficiency, effectiveness and so on and so forth. Basically we have CAPEX challenges and this CAPEX challenges can also be addressed with this move to the cloud example. But what we should be careful and should avoid is that the cost that which we have in terms of CAPEX is just does not get reattributed into another cost called articulation cost or arbitration cost. So having a multi-cloud is definitely a challenge until you have a kind of a orchestrator because we are doing a business here and we don't want to care about pretty much the orchestration, the part of it and this needs to be taken into account. And of course there is this application cloud and there is this infrastructure cloud. You can have as many clouds as you want and whatever function that which it is supporting you but that has to be encapsulated or abstracted away from us so that we are able to focus on the business that we are here to do. And these are certain constraints that I really had as I was thinking about multi-cloud or hybrid cloud and I was even focusing on how am I going to orchestrate all of these different things so that you know you kind of feel abstracted from those things. So those are the constraints that I think we still have to conquer as we progress. I think we are evolving very fastly in that area and you are the experts in that area and you know exactly what you're doing there. But for me what is very important is that yeah it gets abstracted away from us and we just get the scalability that we need, the elasticity that which we need, the security by design, the privacy by design and then I think this is perfect for us. Awesome. So I think a lot of customers that are listening to this are about to jump on the same journey that you're embarking on. Is there a specific use case that you decide to kind of go you know all in on Snowflake? What was the kind of the initial driver for you to say hey then the business driver on you saying hey I'm going to use this use case to drive transformation within Ali on Spenelux? I think virtualization is the key point that comes up at the top of my head the moment you speak about what even did drive me to think about Snowflake as an option. Why virtualization? Because obviously I don't want to move huge amount of data from left, right and center because you know that when you start optimizing such a kind of an architecture you end up creating pockets silos which is totally against what we want to do. We want to break silos but in the end just because of the infrastructure needs and the computational needs et cetera and the response rates and stuff like that you start to create silos. I think with virtualization and especially with the performance that which Snowflake can provide us in that area now it seems like a possibility that we will be able to do that. I mean it was not something that we just thought about let's say a few years back but now it's definitely possible. Virtualization is one of the key points but when you talk in the terms of use cases we at Ali on Spenelux do not look at use cases actually we look at business initiatives. So the reason why we don't look at it as use cases is because use cases we use a kind of a start and a stop but we're not in the game of use cases. We are in the game of delivering a future that which our customer really wants to be secured and that's what the business we are in and that there are no use cases there are initiatives there that which matches to the agenda of our customer. So when you start thinking about like that one of the most important things that Snowflake offers us as an opportunity is to obviously create an environment so to say on elastic scalable situation with the compute that which we need that which basically matches one on one with the agenda of our customer. So what I mean is the data warehousing on the cloud through data warehousing on the cloud is what was one of our driving thought processes for. We did not want to go and say that we will just do data lake, we will just do data hub and we don't belong to a religion so to say we basically are very opportunistic in this approach where we say we will have a data lake, we will have a data warehouse, we will have a data hub and we will integrate it in a very semantic way that which will match to the agenda of the customer and treat the customer as a sort of a centric point. That's great, I appreciate that. So Sudaman, thank you so much for joining us today. And again, thank you for your partnership. We, Snowflake is super excited and I'm super excited to participate in this journey with you. Is there anything that you'd kind of like to let the audience know before we wrap up? Very happy about the way we started to talk, converse. I think the proof of value as we did was a very good engagement with you guys. I mean, you guys were really there. I really appreciate the way that you took the proof of the network with many other vendors in terms of proof of value, but I think you had a marked difference in the way you brought Snowflake to us. Thank you so much and keep doing the good work. Thanks so much, Sudaman, for the partnership and we're super pumped on making you very successful in your project. So thank you so much. Thank you.