In early June, data users and professionals across all industries and from a wide variety of professions gathered at the Snowflake Summit to discuss emerging trends in data, AI, and application development. The four-day conference served as an arena for partners, customers, and industry peers to enjoy inspiring keynotes, educational breakout sessions and networking time with fellow innovators in the industry.
One of the summit highlights was our Chief Product Officer, Hossam Bahlool, interview with Kate Strachnyi, founder of DATAcated. Hossam shared details about the launch of Data Axle Snowflake Clean Room App, our recent positioning as a leader in Forrester’s B2B Marketing and Sales Data Providers Wave, and all things data. Watch the video or read the transcript of the interview below.
Data Axle focuses on data and intelligence solutions. We have over 50 years of experience in helping our clients grow, retain, and acquire new customers as well. Our data also helps provide our customers’ platforms and products with high quality data. We do that through three main offerings.
The first offering is our data solutions themselves. We have a wide variety of data solutions, including our business and consumer data that we provide to sales, marketers, and analysts to be able to understand the market, segment it out, and go after them.
We then wrap this data in SaaS applications that allow those customers to explore, as well as generate intelligence and insights, and then activate against that data.
Finally, we provide a comprehensive set of omnichannel services to help our customers as well — whether it’s to establish an online presence, or define their audience, or activate against it, to then measure and iterate it. So, it’s a comprehensive set of data and services that we provide.
If you think about our client base, and you think about the use cases that I mentioned — customer acquisition, customer engagement, customer retention— it applies to every single industry that’s out there. Our customers range from pharmaceuticals, to healthcare, to insurance, to real estate, to retail, to nonprofits. And in each of those verticals, our customers range from the sole proprietor mom and pop shop that’s looking to grow their business, all the way up to 20% of the Fortune 500 companies that we service right now.
Thank you, we’re actually really excited about that. It meant a lot to us because it really highlighted our commitment to the quality, the breadth and the depth of the data and the solutions that we bring to market. Forrester, in their B2B Wave, they looked at 14 different providers across 28 different criteria. There’s three that I’d want to highlight as they showed how we differentiate.
The B2B data was the first one that they highlighted. This is really a testament to the over 4,000 sources that we ingest, to be able to build up in a dataset of over 450 attributes on 70M+ businesses that we track in the US. That ranges from any attribute that you can think of that a marketer would want to be able to slice and dice against. Whether that’s name, address, phone number, sales volume, employee account, technographic data, intent to purchase certain products or services, hierarchies in terms of headquarters, branches, and subsidiaries — it’s all available in that data set. That was the first of the unique differentiators that Forrester mentioned.
“Forrester highlighted our unique ability to create a 360° view of any individual. Since we compile both business data and consumer data, we’re able to make the link together. “
The secret, I believe, is because we have these omnichannel services that we provide to our customers — it helps us understand our data better. We’re real-world practitioners, we’re not just a compiler of data — we’re practitioners against that data as well. We know the strengths of it, we know areas that we need to improve on, which we then invest in. So that’s the secret to our success when it comes to the first of those three criteria.
The second one that Forrester highlighted was our unique ability to create a 360° view of any individual. Since we compile both business data and consumer data, we’re able to make the link together. Take you as a marketer, for example. If you’re providing credit card offering to a consumer, wouldn’t you love to know that this person is a high net worth individual versus maybe an entry level person that just started their first job?
Exactly. Those are two very different credit card offers you’d want to go with. And vice versa: let’s say that you’re targeting a business professional. Wouldn’t you love to know that this person loves cats, or is a foodie, and be able to personalize the message for them? That’s a secondary that we differentiate on.
And the third area is our customers: it’s not just enough for our customers to have data and data solutions. They want to be able to access this data wherever in their sales stack or marketing stack. If you look around the showroom here, you’ll see that it’s a very complex ecosystem that sales and marketing teams must deal with. The partner ecosystem and integrations that we’ve built out, whether it’s how do we make our data available in your CRM of choice—could be dynamics, it could be Salesforce, or how do we make data available to through an API, or through any system that we’re using right now? This is the third area that Forrester highlighted as a differentiator for us.
Our partnership with Snowflake has evolved based on the market’s needs, and where we started off with Snowflake versus where we are now. As more of our customers were moving to the Snowflake environment, they wanted to collaborate with us in their preferred environment. They were hosting their precious first-party data in Snowflake, and if they wanted us to generate insights on it, or enrich it, they would share it to us through Snowflake, we would do our data processing, and then share it back into the Snowflake environment. That’s the first partnership that we had with Snowflake.
We’ve evolved also from data collaboration to data syndication. How do we make our data solutions (our business data, consumer data, the long tail of specialty data assets) available? How do we make those available to our customers, again, in their preferred environment? We started to make those datasets available in the Snowflake data market. That makes it way easier, right? You’re already in Snowflake? What data is available for me to be able to create an audience of consumers or businesses? That’s the next step.
And then the third step is why we are here today, and that’s evolution beyond collaboration and syndication into creating applications that wrap that.
We’re really excited about this—for both Data Axle and Snowflake users. If you think about any data that you typically interact with, traditionally, you’ve interacted with it in a table form or through an API. But if you look at your phone, you interact with the data through an application that sits on top of it—your calendar, your email, whatever it may be. If you’re sitting in an enterprise, and you have CRM data, you’re interacting with it through that CRM application as well. Applications are really a window into the datasets that you have. We said, alright, well, let’s provide this kind of capability to our Snowflake users that are out there. This is the first of its kind in terms of the capability that we bring in.
“The application is called our Snowflake Clean Room Application, and it combines the wealth of data solutions that we have with the scale and performance of the Snowflake Data Cloud.”
The application is called our Snowflake Clean Room Application, and it combines the wealth of data solutions that we have with the scale and performance of the Snowflake Data Cloud. If our customers have their first-party data sitting in the Snowflake environment, they’re able to match against it, and then enrich it with those 450+ attributes that we bring to the table. There’s no movement of data, you don’t have to deal with info security and legal and so on.
It’s true, but anytime data is moving, you have legal issues or security issues you have to comply with. And more important is the time to market. By the time you get these agreements in place, ship the data off to somebody, they process it, they ship it back— this is processing time. Every minute counts, as you could be marketing against these, or generating intelligence against it.
I’d recommend anybody that’s interested, which I believe has broad applicability to all those industries that I mentioned, visit our website data-axle.com. You’ll find all about the datasets that we offer, the intelligence that we bring to you, as well as information about this Snowflake Clean Room application that we’ve built.
Data Axle is committed to fulfilling the market’s growing data needs. With our availability on Snowflake Marketplace, customers can seamlessly access our robust business data, making it easier for users to quickly enhance their first-party data and add new insights to improve overall data quality and depth without leaving the platform. With this data as the bedrock, customers can create data-derived analytics and insights that help identify prospective customers, inform custom modeling, aid in acquisition, and reduce costs. Demos are available on request via our website.
Stay tuned as we prepare for more exciting developments in the weeks to come! We hope you enjoyed this interview as much as we did. See you next year at the Snowflake Summit!