The making of the Snowflake Solution Center opportunity

For those that might not know me, I am John Marchese, EVP Strategic Business, Alliances & Channels, at DataOps.live. My role is focused on managing our ecosystem, alliances, strategic partners, and the indirect channel. For me, this means developing deep-rooted relationships with Snowflake and its global partners in the ISV, SI/GSI, Cloud, and partner channels surrounding Snowflake.   

So you imagine how thrilled I am to share the news that Snowflake itself has decided to license the DataOps.live platform to prepare and deliver technical sales demonstrations for its global customers. The speed and productivity gains of the enhanced process, called Snowflake Solutions Center, includes improved cost-effectiveness and accelerates sales performance while positively impacting the business insights that are made available to management.   

Why did Snowflake choose DataOps.live? Because it’s solely focused on providing customers who use Snowflake with the ability to deliver data products at the speed and scale of their business demands. We deliver huge cost savings, speed to market, and enable unprecedented business efficiency to our customers that drive tremendous bottom line ROI. 

DataOps.live is unique in the Snowflake ecosystem, and we have become known within the Snowflake organization as a highly effective platform to drive customer success. 

As the word of DataOps.live success spread throughout the global Snowflake organization, many sales and sales engineering (SE) professionals wondered how Snowflake itself could benefit themselves from the capabilities that our platform provides, resulting in an inquiry from Snowflake asking if we might be able to help with a very strategic sales ops problem that they needed to address. In record time, we addressed two areas of the Snowflake organization, both with different needs but with the same problem: 

“How could the Snowflake Sales Engineering global team be more efficient in creating bespoke demos for all industry & customer use cases and product combinations.“ 

As a point of reference, Snowflake had created a now-famous demo called “tastybytes” which showed a great example of food trucks in NYC interactively selling meals to customers. The problem was that while this demo might be useful in certain situations and could be modified with quite a bit of work to change column names and the narrative to serve other scenarios, it still was ultimately about food trucks and hamburgers and didn’t depict use cases related to other industries such as banks or telco’s for example.  

To align the demo to meet these other scenarios better, the SE teams would sometimes need to spend several days modifying it, or worse, creating a new demo entirely from scratch. This wasted valuable time and was a one-off, non-shareable, non-scalable method of delivering what was required. Needless to say, it was also costly and expended a great deal of time and focus from the sales team. 

Build it Yourself (DIY) vs. Bespoke Platform 

Torn between the do-it-yourself route or purchasing a best-of-breed solution, Snowflake entered a POC process with us, where we took their requirements and delivered a solution that met their needs in only 45 days. 

 Snowflake’s team concluded it would take years for them to construct their own solution to tackle these problems and decided to move forward with a Proof of Value (POV). Over the following months, we worked together to develop a plan that met their requirements. 

Snowflake Sales Engineers from across the globe tested the solution for many months in a collaborative process to ensure success. A total of 750 Snowflake SEs are anticipated to be trained and onboarded in the coming months to leverage the benefits of the DataOps.live platform in their sales process.    

DataOps.live was privileged to expand our partnership with Snowflake and was also honored to see that Snowflake confirmed that the DataOps.live platform capabilities could allow them to get to market quickly and eliminate the distraction of building their own solution over many years. 

Here’s how Snowflake is presenting the Solution Center to their internal users: