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Snowflake Launches Telecom Data Cloud to Help Telecommunications Service Providers Monetize Data and Maximize Operational Efficiency

  • The Snowflake Telecom Data Cloud delivers a fully-managed, easy-to-use platform to break down data silos, drive personalized data and application services
  • Snowflake ecosystem of telecom partners with pre-built solutions and industry datasets delivers reduced time-to-value for customers
  • Telecommunications service providers worldwide, including AT&T and M1, use Snowflake to drive digital transformation

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced the launch of the Telecom Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake’s data platform, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets. The Telecom Data Cloud helps telecommunications service providers break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, allowing organizations to easily and securely access data in near real-time, enrich it with machine learning (ML) models, and then share and analyze it to drive better decisions. With the Telecom Data Cloud, Snowflake and its ecosystem of partners can help telecommunications service providers accelerate digital transformation, enable superior customer experiences, maximize operational efficiency, and monetize new data services.

Mobile devices and broadband connectivity are now part of every aspect of day-to-day life. For that reason, the telecommunications sector remains a driver of growth, innovation, and disruption for all global businesses, especially in rapidly growing industries such as video streaming, Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality. The revenue shift from traditional products to innovative cross-industry collaboration solutions requires an evolution of the telecommunications business model. To stay ahead, telecommunications companies must transition away from complex legacy technologies in order to modernize their networks and to deliver value to partners across industries.

With Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud, telecommunications companies can adjust to this new reality and use Snowflake to:

  • Modernize the telecom network: Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud offers a single, fully-managed, secure platform for multi-cloud data consolidation with unified governance and elastic performance that supports virtually any scale of storage, compute, and users.
  • Maximize operational efficiency: With one unified platform, teams across IT, network engineering, data science, network operations, and product management can collaborate using data to improve planning, make faster business decisions, rapidly respond to customer needs, better manage network resources, and reduce time to market on new services.
  • Advanced AI and ML capabilities: Snowflake and Snowpark enable machine generated data in near-real time using ML models to predict faults, schedule maintenance ahead of time, and to reduce operational downtime.
  • Monetize data and applications: Telecommunications service providers can create more personalized data and application service offerings with Snowflake Marketplace and launch innovative new services, including monetization around advertising and selling IoT data to any industry.
  • Leverage industry leading network of telecommunications partners: Take advantage of a rich partner ecosystem and their industry-specific, prebuilt templates to build valuable industry solutions faster.

“The next wave of growth and innovation in the telecommunications industry will undoubtedly be powered by data and requires collaboration across businesses and industries,” said Phil Kippen, Global Head of Industry, Telecom at Snowflake. “Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud unlocks these opportunities by creating one unified platform, enabling secure data collaboration by connecting telecommunications service providers with a rich ecosystem of applications, data, and technology partners.”

Some of the largest global customers in the telecommunications industry are already using Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud to grow revenue and maximize operational efficiency. Customer use cases include:

  • AT&T - With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, AT&T is driving to a single source of truth for their data across the organization where business partners can seamlessly access AT&T’s data to improve their customer experience and maximize operational efficiencies.
  • OneWeb - The low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications company was able to move their data operations over to Snowflake in just six weeks and is leveraging Snowflake to harness the power of space data for the enhanced performance of its network, as well as to monetize data through new space data services.
  • M1 - Singapore’s first digital network operator uses Snowflake to combine data from M1’s CRM, billing systems, website, and mobile app to provide a more complete view of the customer experience as it drives transformation and evolution in the local telecommunications landscape.

Within the Telecom Data Cloud, customers can access industry-specific solutions to leverage best practices, reduce time-to-value, and increase overall impact. Companies announcing new pre-built solutions include:

  • Applications Powered by Snowflake, like the one developed by AMDOCS, allow telecommunications providers to modernize their business (including moving to the cloud and 5G monetization efforts) and simplify business processes around charging, billing, and new digital services.
  • Snowflake Marketplace partners, like Flywheel, OneWeb, and TransUnion enable live access to a variety of data sources leveraging Snowflake’s privacy-preserving collaboration technology, including satellite, geospatial, or demographic data to unlock new revenue streams and power innovative business solutions.
  • Consulting and service companies likeAmazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, SDG Group, Prodapt Consulting, and Wipro Limited can reduce time-to-value for customers with pre-build partner solutions that help solve for top priority use cases, including integrating OSS and BSS data, maximizing operational efficiency, and monetizing data to help grow business value.
  • Technology partners like Alteryx, CARTO, DigitalRoute, H2O.AI, Informatica, Sigma Computing, and ThoughtSpot provide integrations and out-of-the-box solutions so customers can attain deeper insights and realize the full power and ease of use of the Telecom Data Cloud.

Learn more about the partner-tailored solutions for the telecommunications industry here.

Comments on the news

  • “Our focus at AT&T is always on ensuring that we’re delivering meaningful customer experiences and leveraging our data to maximize operational efficiencies as well as new monetization efforts to grow the business,” said Andy Markus, Chief Data Officer at AT&T. “With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, we’ve been able to democratize and liberate our data to meet these goals.”
  • “M1 is on a journey of digital transformation to revamp digital experiences across all touchpoints and made-to-measure offerings for all customers. As we move the company beyond connectivity, Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud has given us a single source of truth and made data a fundamental ingredient in enabling hyper-personalization. This empowers the business to deliver next-gen customer experience while driving real value for our customers,” said Danny Thien, Director and Head of Data at M1.
  • “Snowflake was able to fit seamlessly in giffgaff’s new data strategy, both in centralizing data, and enabling the business to do more with the data,” said Geoff Pritchard, Data Strategy Product Manager, giffgaff UK. “Through Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud, we were able to process and analyze terabytes of call data over the course of a month from eight hours per day to just two hours at the end of the month. We’ve now extended this to financial monthly reporting too, which would not be possible without Snowflake.”
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AT&T has been creating data lakes since 2013. In about 2015 most of the AT&T mobility business had move to LTE (Long Term Evolution) This evolution eliminated all of the circuit switching in the wireless system and moved the transmission from the UI (User device) to the end user to native Ethernet. As such all data could then be captured and anonymized. (AT&T is very serious about privacy and has been that way for a century)

However, while a phone is on, it is constantly communicating with the network, providing location data for E911 as well as allowing the system to know where the phone is so it can send communications to it. (If AT&T does not know where you are it cannot send a text or phone call to you)

Moreover, this native Ethernet situation goes deeper into the network. So, now the backhaul, the communications from the cell tower the the servers, is now all native Ethernet. All of the overhead and telemetry is captured.

What is more, there are many
severs involved in the establishment and maintenance of a phone connection. These servers have been moved into on premise clouds and are handled by hypervisors and those hypervisors are controlled by AI.

At one time, the TIRKS data base that listed every phone line in the world was the largest database in the world. But I suspect that the telemetry data lakes that AT&T has amassed is far greater.

The amount of efficiency that can be derived from the proper use of data can be amazing.

Cheers
Qazulight

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I’m wondering if within these Industry Specific Data Clouds, Now with the Telco-Data Cloud on Snowflake, is there going to to be cross pollination of the Data into Snowflakes Powered By offering, once the Data is sent through Snowflakes Clean Room. That would be expected, I’d think. That would mean more revenue steams other than just the ‘Storage and Compute ‘.

3/17/22

When Snowflake announced…”the Snowflake Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud”, Snowflake said…, “healthcare companies (now) have a single, integrated, and cross-cloud data platform that eliminates technical and institutional data silos. This will enable organizations to securely centralize, integrate, and exchange critical and sensitive data at scale. Snowflake ensures high levels of data security and governance, and its built-in capabilities and extended partner network better allow companies to meet compliance requirements and satisfy industry regulations…”.

Me here: I’m assuming the Telco vertices will be likewise, I just like the way Snowflake said this then, better. I anticipated more Data Clouds (Verticles) to come (in addition to the the five others including: Financials, Retail, etc).But it’s been a while, not since nearly a year ago with the introduction of HealthCare and LifeSciences, I believe.

6/5/22

CEO in Q&A: … we see opportunity absolutely everywhere at this point. We have a very – on a daily basis, we can see which customers, which verticals, which use cases, which workloads are trending and which ones are not. So we have the ability to adjust direct investments where they’re most likely to have the yield and the impact what we’re looking for. But we’re not in a – there’s no reason for us to be in a battening down the hatches mode, because the investments that we’re making are continuing to yield. I mean, we’ve been saying that, if we start backing off from our growth trajectory, considering how well it’s working for us. Our opportunity is incredibly broad-based. I mean there’s still verticals where we’re not very well penetrated as well [such as Federal]. … over the long haul, we really plan to have a very, very large business in those sectors. But that’s not something you sort of turn on and off on a dime. Once you’re on an investment process there, you got to – you have to stick with it.

For those not clear on the Powered By offerings at Snowflake, here’s my notes on that…

4/27/22, Peter Offringa

As part of Powered BySnowflake has identified 5 target market segments for their offering. You can view the white paper at this link (https://resources.snowflake.com/ebooks/the-product-managers-…). It may require a light registration.

  • Customer 360: Marketing or sales automation applications that benefit from a complete view of the customer. This view is used to drive targeted customer interactions, like email campaigns. With the move to first party data, these capabilities are becoming critical for all retailers to have. Offerings from Twilio SendGrid and Instacart fall into this segment. ZoomInfo is a customer of Snowflake.

  • IoT:Consumption of time series data from fleets of smart devices and sensors. Advantage to partners is that ingestion, analysis and storage of large amounts of device data requires enormous compute and storage resources. Additionally, data pipelines can be complicated to set up and integrate with data sources. Snowflake has done most of the heavy lifting here.

  • Application health and security analytics: This one does what it sounds like, with the target usage being observability and SIEM. I don’t think companies building these solutions will displace Datadog, Splunk, Crowdstrike and other established players, but could focus on sub-segments of these markets (i.e. observability of specific closed systems, like cellular networks, fraud detection or manufacturing lines).

  • Machine learning and data science: Combined with popular machine learning tools (who are technology partners), Powered By companies could build sophisticated prediction services, like product recommendations, retailer optimization, supply chain, vehicle maintenance schedules, etc. While a company could spin up this infrastructure themselves, by using Powered By, users can take advantage of Snowflake’s data sharing and clean room capabilities to minimize data copying.

  • Embedded analytics data apps: Customers can deliver rich visualizations and dashboards directly from Snowflake’s data storage and processing engine. I think this segment is less about a stand-alone company building a product offering, and more about highlighting Snowflake’s move up into the application stack. Normally, to deliver a data rich application, the engineering team would provision a separate database and app delivery infrastructure. By reducing query times and increasing concurrency, Snowflake is making a case that these data applications could be run directly on top of Snowflake, eliminating the extra hosting infrastructure and data copying. The Streamlit acquisition further supports this move by offering a development framework for building these data-intensive apps. The difference from standard OLTP databases is that the write load would be minimal for these applications.

At the end of Q4, Snowflake reported 285 companies participating in the Powered By program. As we look forward, utilization of the Powered By program could support the durability of Snowflake’s overall revenue growth. It would accomplish this by creating new revenue streams that are separate from their traditional reliance on data warehouse migrations and powering analytics workloadsfor enterprise customers.

Best

Jason

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Jason - sure, the per-Industry Data Clouds partners may add more and more into the Powered By program, though I’m not sure what you mean by “more revenue streams” – these Industry clouds are all to get data centralization and drive compute over it.

But those are really 2 separate directions…

  • Industry clouds brings all participants in an industry together around common needs (data sharing, marketplace, clean rooms, svc partners).

  • Powered By designates a platform that has built itself ATOP Snowflake, as either as a Connected or Native way. Some of the participants in the Industry clouds are Powered By, but I don’t see it as a driver into that program. Powered By is an architectural choice for how you build your platform over Snowflake (connected for outside services, native for embedded services).

But yes, the Industry Data Clouds could help drive these into the Powered By program. The PR above mentions AMDOCS as a Telco platform built atop Snowflake.

What I think it better to focus on (in regards to Industry Data Clouds) is the Native Applications that are emerging. Powered By partners can build embeddable applications directly inside the customer’s environment that leverages all its capabilities (data sharing, specialized enrichment, clean rooms) all within the customer’s environment. Industry Data Clouds absolutely provide a strong base of customers/partners that can be interlinked with these embedded solutions, and may provide a ripe market to sell these embeddable apps into. I hope to see many native industry- or usecase-specific solutions emerge.

  • muji
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Hi Muji, thanks for this thoughtful reply.
When you said, “ I hope to see many native industry- or usecase-specific solutions emerge.”. I too see Data intensive Apps being provided to those within the industry, this new vertical being Telco.

I believe Snowflake will also expand their number of revenue streams from the storage and Compute within each of the Data Clouds. They’ll do this by including the Data Shared within each Data Cloud with those Companies not in the particular Industry for which each Data Cloud was created. And when this sharing of Data moves out of the Industry specific Data Clouds it’ll first go to Snowflakes’ Powered By offering.

The powered By Snowflake offering is a platform for App Developers to create Data Intensive (needing to sit on top of Hyperscalers, as opposed to ‘data intensive’ Apps that may live on the edge in Cloudflare POPs) where I foresee many many industries benefiting from the Data being shared within the Industry specific Data Cloud.

Just as Master Card and moreso Visa sell customer data to retailers, I see many many uses for the Data, in each of the Data Clouds Snowflake has established, being used by those not only within each particular industry.:star_struck:.

My understanding is that Snowflake stands to make significant revenue from their Powered by Snowflake platform separate from the Industry specific Data Clouds. Although I have no breakdown of the pricing, I understand Development platforms make a good bit of income.

Best

Jason

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