On June 18th, Infostrux CEO, Goran Kimovski (Kima) sat down with S. Somasegar (Soma) to discuss Soma’s experience and lessons as a board member and early investor in Snowflake. Kima and Soma discuss the concept and value of the data cloud and why data exchange will be as important as data warehousing. As an active angel investor and seed investor, Soma describes what makes a great investment and what he looks for while investing in both enterprise and consumer segments.
.png?width=60&height=52&name=Kima%20bubble_Icon%20(1).png)
Kima: We have this concept of certified data sets, and the goal is to architect and model the data inside Snowflake to meet high standards such as quality, reliability, and security. Can you share a little bit of your thinking as to why you think businesses need to invest in reliable data models inside platforms like Snowflake?
Soma: Reliable data models are absolutely essential for a company to align itself on a common framework and a set of metrics that enable everybody to build and share an understanding of the business. The more you have a shared understanding of business, then you can think about what are the key inputs to my business decisions, what are the key inputs to my performance evaluation, how do I think about the data with a common set of nomenclature to be able to do all the right things and get all the value that I can get out of a data set that I can trust.
When everybody in the organization trusts the same data models and trusts the same metrics, then the whole company can think about where to focus and what to improve – whether it’s in the short term, medium term, or long term – and then be able to grow in the same direction.
If you are one of these companies, or one of these customers, that decide to build reliable data models in Snowflake, the advantage is that you have a single source of truth for the company. All the different teams that are looking at it from different angles get to work on the same data model and the same data set.
So if you want to think about having the operational infrastructure that enables you to have a consistent set of reliable data models for your organization so that all the downstream applications and BI and analytics work that is happening in your company can work off of the same data model, that’s a tremendous win-win for your company, and for what you are trying to do. More importantly, for you to be able to have the highest probability of getting value and insight out of the data you have.
So for me, having reliable data models and data sets you can trust and having it in a system like Snowflake is a fantastic start to how you can use data in meaningful ways to advance your business.
Kima: It becomes an enabler and accelerator; I agree with you. It’s a relief for us to claim that we’ve validated the opportunity, so far a lot of our customers agree that making data useful and reliable is essential. If you can give access to data to more people and they can trust that data, it enables many interesting use cases.
