Streamline Your Analytics Practice with Heap and Snowflake

February 27, 20193 min read

In the past 20 plus years of being in the digital space, I’ve seen the evolution of how companies struggle to collect and take action with data. Twenty years ago, there really wasn’t a digital team. It was part of IT. Fast forward to today and the digital team is, well, everyone in the company. Everyone from CEOs down interacts with digital applications for both internal and external purposes to do their job. The amount of data that is available today in those applications keeps growing at an astounding rate. IDC predicts worldwide data creation will grow to an enormous 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. That’s 10 times the amount of data produced in 2017.

For how innovative the industry has been over the past two decades, it’s surprising to see that a majority of companies still depend on a lot of manual coding to gain access to data. I think everyone appreciates the fine craftsmanship of something hand-built. But in business, you can be left in the dust if you don’t have the speed needed to make decisions and are slow to market. It’s critical that you understand the impact of changes in your digital applications, new products released, and other digital initiatives that require data.

Companies also need relief from worrying about data they left behind. In other words, they need insurance that they have all the valuable pieces of information today, tomorrow, and even six or 16 months later. Automating as much as you can from collection to insights is critical to compete in today’s market.

The Heap and Snowflake Partnership

To that end, Heap is excited to announce the industry’s most comprehensive customer behavioral dataset for Snowflake. The solution gives our customers the ability to capture behavioral data with the least amount of coding. Heap’s approach to data collection, governance, and organization enables you to securely access a complete, trustworthy set of data with little developer resources. Coupled with Heap’s fully managed, retroactive ETL pipeline and Snowflake’s zero maintenance approach to data warehousing allows your analytics team to focus on delivering key business insights rather than maintaining infrastructure.

Heap’s ETL process takes advantage of Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing to eliminate the cost of transferring, loading, and storing organizations’ Heap data. Heap customers who aren’t using Snowflake can still securely query their Heap data using a Heap-provided Snowflake Reader Account. And even better, organizations that leverage both Heap and Snowflake can seamlessly and securely join their Heap data with all the rest of the data in their Snowflake account.

“Snowflake is excited to partner with Heap to allow our joint customers to natively, seamlessly, and securely join their Heap data to the rest of the data in their data warehouse,” said Justin Langseth, VP Data Sharing Business Development. “Heap is a lighthouse example of using the power of Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing technology to develop deeper, trusted, and transparent data-driven relationships between a SaaS provider and their customers.”

Powering a Customer-First Strategy with Data

More and more we see companies create a complete 360-degree view of their customers by marrying datasets from both online and offline sources. By providing more personalized experiences to customers, companies can better leverage techniques such as machine learning (ML) and targeted communications, fueled by these datasets available in their data warehouse.

Companies need to have a customer-first mentality, and at the heart of this is being data-centric. Actioning their customer data should be key to this competitive strategy. Heap and Snowflake expedite this process and shift the focus from maintaining data loading and storage infrastructure to building actionable solutions.

The partnership is committed to making it easier to self service the entire data supply chain from collection and governance, to storage and distribution. We are very excited about our continued partnership with Snowflake. In the coming months leading up to the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco this June, we will have more to announce that will provide benefits to our mutual customers.