Snowflake, Blockbuster, Netflix, & YouTube...? What is DataCloud & Why it should matter to you?

Over the years, a big part of my job has been to turn highly technical concepts into things that anyone can understand. The easiest way I found doing this is by relating technology to everyday things that we do or deal with.

Well, Snowflake's DataCloud is no exception. Freaking awesome technology that will forever change how organizations will exchange data among each other to make the business world a much better place but not so easy to explain what it is, it does & how it can impact the business to a business or even an IT person. So back to relating to things we know very well....videos.

Before we can understand the DataCloud, we need to understand the current world of moving & exchanging data across businesses. This is a perfect segway to Blockbuster.

Blockbuster was the king of the jungle, an 800lb gorilla in the movie & entertainment industry. Anyone who is old enough knows that everyone had a VCR and Blockbuster was the major movie rental franchise in the country. If you enjoyed movies, you probably visited them one too many times in the past. Let's look at their business model and why they are no longer with us. Every time a new movie came out, Blockbuster had to take the master copy of the VHS tape, made gazillion copies of it, distribute a few of them to each store. Then as a customer, you had to go to their store, pay a rental fee to take that VHS tape to your home & stick it into your VCR, hope the tape was in good working condition and the previous customer rewound it before returning the tape in order to watch it.

This process repeated every time a new movie came out. Just imagine how many rentals they lost because they did not have enough tapes on the shelves in each store because they did not have the capacity to make enough copies or to distribute them fast enough? Or frustrated customers where the tape was damaged or VCR was defective. I personally remember my frustrations very clearly from those days.

So their business model is fairly similar to what you see businesses do when they are sharing and exchanging their data. When a new movie comes, they make copies, and those copies are handed to a customer. Then they hope the tapes work and the customer has a proper VCR so they can watch it. You can see this model is not very scalable, secure, or customer-friendly.

You can only make & distribute so many copies using the resources you have and once you hand one of those tapes, you have no idea what happens to it. Also customers are not always successful finding an available tape or being able to play it on their own VCR.

In today's world, sharing data works much the same way. A new version of the data becomes available, the data provider starts making copies of it then sends them as files to businesses that need to use that dataset. Providers also can't handle high demand so they usually deal with only the biggest consumers. Just like movies, data replication is limited by the provider's capacity to duplicate & distribure the data.

Here comes Netflix's current business model which put an end to Blockbuster's dominance. They improved customer experience & lowered their costs by simplifying & eliminating distribution & consumption-related problems. No lost rentals due to not having Tapes or DVDs, no delays in getting the movies in the hands of customers along with a much cheaper & scalable distribution model. Netflix has one copy of the movie stored on some cloud server and everyone else simply streams that move in live fashion instantly. If they change the movie or add a new episode, it is one copy that gets put on the server and everyone sees it all at once at the same time. And it is fully scalable where they don't care if they 100 users or millions because they don't have to replicate the content or processes for each user.

We know this as Streaming Movies! If I want to watch something, I simply click on that content on any device and start watching it right at that second. If a new episode is available or even the producer changes the scenes in an existing movie, I don't need to do anything on my end, it just shows up on my screen. I got access to millions of movies and other video content that could never fit in a Blockbuster store & everything is always there and accessible right now and live.

Snowflake's DataCloud brings the same streaming content delivery concept to delivering & consuming #data for businesses. It makes providing, delivering & consuming data between a data provider and consumer as easy as watching a movie on Netflix or some other streaming service. Data provider has one copy of data that they can stream to any number of consumers/customers where the number of consumers they are distributing to does not matter and can scale to any number. Consumers have 1-click instant access to any of the data where they don't have to wait. The way they have access to that data is pretty much identical to streaming movies where it is always live where the consumer never has to worry about updating or refreshing it.

So what' up with YouTube then? How is that relevant other than being another streaming content service? Well... Netflix is a read-only medium where consumers watch movies. If you were a business that simply wanted to access streaming data to look at it or analyze in isolation, then Netflix would be a good analogy.

However, business is not a read-only consumption model. Business data access is a content creation model. Meaning businesses want access to data that is not theirs to blend and augment it with their own internal datasets to create new & more valuable datasets of their own. Those new datasets are sometimes used strictly by that business or most often need to be shared(streamed) to other parties because there is value in it for both the provider and the consumer.

Imagine you are a YouTube content creator (VLOGGER) where you have your own recorded content but you also need to add scenes & segments from other media content on the YouTube platform. You can cut & paste clips to add to your recording and make an awesome video that could get millions of views and make a lot of money. You are essentially enhancing your content with other 3rd party content that is readily available on the same platform with a single mouse click. On top of all that, the 3rd party content you are adding is always live where if the 3rd part content changes, your content gets updated in real-time as well without you having to manually update & manage every single clip. Now you are not only able to access/watch millions of 3rd party content instantly like you do in Netflix but now can also create brand new content of your own by blending your own recordings with others to end up with much more valuable video assets.

And once you got that new video created, you can also distribute it to millions of viewers with a single mouse click without any major cost to you and monetize it in a way where you make more money based on the number of users, how long & how often they watch your content.

And unlike Blockbuster where you lose all visibility once the VHS tape leaves your hands, YouTube gives you all the usage stats that you can think of in terms of who is watching it, how long, and what parts of it as well as what parts are not being watched. This is huge because it allows you to continuously improve your content based on real-life live telemetry data to take out stuff that is not being watched and replacing it with stuff that gets more attention.

Snowflake's DataCloud follows the same principles. It allows you to stream other 3rd party data content in a live fashion. Blend that content with your own internal data and possibly apply Machine learning & DataScience models to enrich it even further to create brand new data assets which are much more valuable than any of the individual datasets alone. Now that you have this great data content, you can freely use it internally to make increase revenue, margins or decrease costs but you can share that data in a streaming fashion with other organizations where it simply shows up in their warehouse once they click on a button either for free or as a paid dataset that lets you monetize it. On top of all that, you get telemetry on the consumer's usage of your data to see who is using it & how they are using it for product improvement and upsell purposes as well as seeing who stopped using it or started using it much less for identifying at-risk customers for better customer retention.

All of that with just a few mouse clicks to obtain, use & distribute data but none of the headaches that come with maintenance, administration, refreshing & distribution of it using Snowflake's live DataCloud Network.

If you got a Snowflake account, go click on some free datasets to see how awesome it is. If you are not on Snowflake and using traditional on-prem or cloud data platforms which are all offering nothing but an improved Blockbuster experience when it comes to exchanging & using data, then it is time to open a new Snowflake account and see what streaming live data for analytics in the 21st century looks like.