Snowflake recently held their 2023 Data for Breakfast series in Australia. InterWorks was a black diamond partner for two events in the series (Perth and Melbourne), and I was lucky enough to attend both of these events and present on behalf of our amazing company and clients. The general format of the event was as follows:
- Registration
- An hour of mingling – and coffee!
- An hour and a half of presentations over a delicious breakfast
- Additional mingling and networking
All up the event was a total of 3 hours, with the presentations segmented as below:
- Snowflake presentation – “What Is The Data Cloud” touching on cool functionality
- Customer presentation
- Snowflake customer and partner joint presentation – showing how partners can help you on your Snowflake journey
- Customer and partner Q&A panel
At these sorts of events, I love hearing what other customers are doing. For those of you who missed these particular events, below is an overview of what was covered.
Perth Customer Presentation – VGW (Virtual Gaming Worlds)
In Perth, Phillip Hampton from VGW presented for the solo customer segment. For those of you haven’t heard of VGW, they are a fast growing technology company that creates and operates online social casino style games. VGW is only just starting to transition out of start-up mode, so it was extremely interesting to hear about their journey and especially how their needs and ideas of and for data have changed. They showed a high level of growth and maturity, and had some great nuggets of wisdom to share with those who are looking to start their data journey. Hopefully, I won’t do Phillip a disservice by trying to summarise a couple of the key points that I took away:
- You can get started really rapidly with Snowflake and unlock value quickly, but if you can, try to spend time up-front planning your RBAC (role based access control) model to save tech regret and minimise rework.
- It’s worth taking a step back and looking at the big picture before you start building. Streamline your data movement to reduce complexity, confusion and maintenance difficulties.
Perth Customer & Partner Presentation – DHL and InterWorks
I presented solo in Perth, talking about how InterWorks and Snowflake have been able to help DHL establish their new cloud data and analytics platform, with some great use cases:
- Dedicated data and analytics platform: DHL were very keen to find a platform with the ability to scale to meet needs; they have seen huge value separating storage from compute. Snowflake has enabled them to easily provide curated data sets for their global user base. They have already migrated 4,800 users to content created in and powered by Snowflake, and this community continues to grow.
- Supporting their data science and data analytics community: It was important to empower their community, but still keep some guardrails in place. Self-service is encouraged with ringfenced sandbox environments for development.
- Data sharing: Easy, secure data transfer within and without DHL via data exchange and also leveraging public data sets available within the data marketplace.
Melbourne Customer Presentation – Kmart
This was, honestly, one of the most enjoyable presentations I’ve seen in a long while. Rory Wooster told us about Tory, a robot who takes inventory in the stores each night. Tory does this by cruising around and activating the RFID chips in all of their stock, sending all this information back into Snowflake. Having up-to-date knowledge of their inventory and a map of where it can all be found has really helped Kmart streamline and target their activities, reduce waste and provide a better service to their customers. Hooray for robots and data! What I also enjoyed about this presentation was the fact that Rory was very clear to identify himself as “not a techie,” but someone who had a very solid understanding of business process and was able to work with data specialists to drive business value. He explained how he’s stepping into Snowflake after a little bit of self-learning. He’s now able to get the data he needs, provide data to others, and is even building the data community by showing others how to access Snowflake and get the data that they are after. It really is that easy to use!
Melbourne Customer & Partner Presentation – AFL and Interworks
InterWorks love being able to help this iconic Australian sport leverage Snowflake to support their analytics needs. David Nicol is a very knowledgeable Lead Data Engineer with AFL and was able to talk sincerely and authentically about how fantastic Snowflake has been to help them with their goals of supporting and growing membership, sharing data with clubs, growing grass-roots footy and focusing on public safety with contact tracing during the height of COVID-19. AFL are continuing to pursue various analytics use cases, and will continue to foster the AFL club data community.
I was really impressed by the crowd participation in both locations, with each audience having lots of knowledgeable and insightful questions for the presenters. I really recommend attending future events.
