Snowflake Continues APAC Expansion, Enters the PHL With Globe as a Partner

Snowflake, one of the world’s leading cloud-native data companies, is expanding, and it has just reached the Philippines by way of Globe Telecom, one of the Philippines’ largest mobile operators. The two firms formally announced their collaboration in a hybrid roundtable with the media held on the 11th of October.

Sanjay Deshmukh, Senior Regional Vice President, ASEAN and India, at Snowflake, represented the U.S.-based data firm and talked in detail about the company, its ongoing expansion and the partnership with Globe. According to Deshmukh, Globe specifically chose Snowflake to help it leverage its trove of data and accelerate its internal transformation journey in the process.

“We could not have asked for a better platform to launch our expansion in Southeast Asia, and particularly launch our business in the Philippines,” said Deshmukh. “We are able to make this announcement with Globe given how we’ve helped them with their internal transformation journey.”

Mobilising Data With Snowflake

Similarly, it seems Globe could not have had a better partner for its data needs than Snowflake, whose vision, according to Deshmukh, is to “mobilise the world’s data” as companies “have yet to realise its full value.” But with Snowflake, and the innovations it continuously rolls out, companies like Globe will be able to unleash the true power of their data. And based on Snowflake’s record-setting IPO in 2019, it seems many are buying in on the data company’s promise of solving business problems using—what else?—data.

“Every business problem today is a data problem. Most customers, regardless of the industry they are in, function like a digital company,” Deshmukh noted. “And if you look at the products and services they are offering, the true differentiation for them comes from how much they know the customer—how they are able to personalise services for them, and how they are able to offer them a better experience. If you think about all these things, it is only feasible for you to personalise services or come up with a better-targeted campaign or offer a better experience with the help of data.”

Deshmukh doubled down on his initial point that every business problem is a data problem, saying: “Irrespective of what company you are, what size of company you are and what problem you’re trying to solve—whether it is about personalisation, optimising the costs of your supply chain, trying to solve a climate-related problem with ESG—every single problem, the foundation of that is data.”

The Attributes of Snowflake, the Modern Data Platform

Solving those problems, again, is Snowflake’s ultimate mission, and it intends to do that by being a modern data platform, which has seven attributes, according to Deshmukh. These attributes include having the capability to consolidate all data, being able to support all workloads, enabling collaboration, promoting ease of use, ensuring security and governance and proving multi-cloud support and functionality.

These, incidentally, are the attributes of Snowflake Data Cloud, whose capability to consolidate all data—structured, semi-structured and unstructured—is near unrivalled. It is also renowned for enabling seamless collaboration and supporting all workloads, eliminating the need to utilise different technology stacks for different business use-cases. In addition, Deshmukh highlighted Snowflake Data Cloud’s ease of use (thanks to it being an as-a-Service offering), commitment to security and governance (one of the pillars of the company) and multi-cloud support.

Maximising Data With Snowflake

The Snowflake-Globe partnership is ultimately about democratising data and enabling data-driven decision-making—a critical capability for a telco that collects a trove of data on a daily basis.

“We want to make decision-making powered by data possible to as many job functions in the least possible time with the least dependency from others,” said Dan Noel Natindim, Vice President, Enterprise Data Office, at Globe. “While we’re happy with 68% of our ad-hoc reports being fulfilled via self-service, it is not enough. Users and executives always want to get deeper into data and have more questions.”

With Snowflake, key decision-makers can probe the data all they want, especially now that Globe, according to Deshmukh, is in the midst of a massive data modernisation initiative, having “migrated its massive enterprise data warehouse from on-premises to Snowflake’s Data Cloud in 53 days.” Aside from democratising data and deriving the most value from it, the Philippines’ largest telco can also expect “a 50% rise in annual cost savings,” according to Deshmukh.  

Solving Data Problems With Snowflake

Deshmukh emphasised that companies trying to solve business problems related to data need a modern data platform—and that is exactly what Globe has gotten by partnering with the U.S.-based data company.

“That’s what we offer at Snowflake. Our goal is to offer this modern data platform,” explained Deshmukh. “What we’ve developed over the last 10 years—Snowflake Data Cloud—is built on these tenets we’ve talked about, which is supporting all the data, supporting all the workloads, making sure it is secure, making sure it enables data collaboration. That is what Snowflake Data Cloud is all about.”

Yes, Snowflake is all that. And Globe and the Philippines—and the rest of the region real soon—are about to find out more.