The story behind the re-boot of the Snowflake Sydney User Group

Thank you for reading my latest article The story behind the re-boot of the Snowflake Sydney User Group.?

Here at LinkedIn I regularly write about modern data platforms and technology trends.To read my future articles simply join my network here or click 'Follow'. Also feel free to connect with me via YouTube.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It was back in 2011 when I kicked off the SQL Server user group in Cardiff, Wales.

It was a way of bringing together the technical community around the SQL Server group of products (aka BI stack) to share ideas, knowledge and experience, and of course networking over pizzas was a key highlight of those events!!

Lots of people in the community came together to make it work, whether it was speakers giving up their time and travelling to present, to securing a venue, helping promote the event, through to ordering and collecting the pizzas! It really was a team effort and many people went above and beyond to make these sessions a success.

They often say history repeats itself. So fast forward (a full 13 years!) to the present day and I find myself back in charge of putting together another user group.

While some things remain unchanged - such as pizzas and the help of the community - many things naturally change. The city now is Sydney, Australia and the technology is Snowflake.

This month INTELLIGEN joined forces with our partners at Snowflake to re-boot the Sydney Snowflake user group which had remained dormant since Covid.

Held at the Snowflake offices in Sydney - which also had fantastic views - we worked hard to promote and bring together speakers and run the event is just a couple of weeks. A real testament to the people who worked hard behind the scenes to get this off the ground!

You’re never quite sure of a number of things when running an event in a new location. How many people will register and then turn up after a busy day in the office? How will people access the building? Will the timing work well??

Thankfully we had a strong turn out from the loyal data community and the logistics such as getting access to enter the building and people finding their way to the right floor, although challenging we made it work just fine.

We had planned for a short, snappy format to keep the session lively. After a day at work you need to consider how to keep people engaged and make it interesting.

We had 3 talks lined up each of 20 mins which included the overarching theme of ‘Snowflake and AWS better together’. If you’re not aware AWS have recently invested into this partnership with Snowflake as the vast majority of Snowflake customers run on AWS globally.?

First we had Sagar Kulkani, Sales partner engineer who, with the help of Rishu Saxena took us through a technical presentation of Snowpark with AWS Sagemaker. Certainly a hot topic within the community at the moment as Snowflake continues to mature and release more capabilities into the AI/ML space.

Next we had Navan Tirupathi from Core Logic who look after a lot of the housing market data and insights here in Australia. Navan and his team had made great progress and added real value using Snowflake and leveraging AWS as was evidenced by the 3 use cases he described including building a single customer view, data marketplace and listings and sales.

Finally we had James Weakley and Chris Chandler from start up Omnata . They both had every day jobs like you or me but decided to take action and dive into the deep end of the start up world to start building products to solve real world business challenges. James and Chris are getting ready to release a product which uses the native app framework to the market. Watch this space or follow Omnata for more info!

It was this product in fact which helped them recently make to the semi final round of the snowflake startup challenge.The Snowflake Startup Challenge is a contest for early-stage startups that are building innovative applications and products powered by Snowflake’s Data Cloud. The winner and finalists may receive up to $1 million in investments from Snowflake, mentorship from industry leaders at NYSE-listed companies, along with global exposure, and the opportunity to ring the NYSE Bell! For more information head here.

After this we broke out into full networking mode with pizzas and drinks kindly supplied by Snowflake. People value the networking aspect more than ever since covid and the opportunity to meet many people in person who’d I only ever spoke to virtually was fantastic.?

Intelligen Special thanks to Andrew Montgomery and Sagar Kulkarni from Snowflake who were instrumental in making this happen, plus the rest of the Snowflake team.

We hope to run the next event shortly after snowflake summit towards the end of July so follow me on linked in for updates or join our dedicated LinkedIn group to stay up to date with the announcement of the next date.

To stay up to date with the latest business and tech trends in data and analytics, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, follow me on LinkedIn, and YouTube, and, if you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into Snowflake check out my books ‘Mastering Snowflake Solutions’ and ‘SnowPro Core Certification Study Guide’.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About Adam Morton

Adam Morton is an experienced data leader and author in the field of data and analytics with a passion for delivering tangible business value. Over the past two decades Adam has accumulated a wealth of valuable, real-world experiences designing and implementing enterprise-wide data strategies, advanced data and analytics solutions as well as building high-performing data teams across the UK, Europe, and Australia.?

Adam’s continued commitment to the data and analytics community has seen him formally recognised as an international leader in his field when he was awarded a Global Talent Visa by the Australian Government in 2019.

Today, Adam works in partnership with Intelligen Group, a Snowflake pureplay data and analytics consultancy based in Sydney, Australia. He is dedicated to helping his clients to overcome challenges with data while extracting the most value from their data and analytics implementations.

He has also developed a signature training program that includes an intensive online curriculum, weekly live consulting Q&A calls with Adam, and an exclusive mastermind of supportive data and analytics professionals helping you to become an expert in Snowflake. If you’re interested in finding out more, visit www.masteringsnowflake.com.