Not shy about sharing its playbook with the world, Amazon Web Services Inc. is open about its winning strategies. As AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy often states in interviews, the company ignores competition and focuses 100 percent on customers’ desires. It’s a sure cue for rivals hoping to snag some cloud business from the market leader. It’s also how AWS ecosystem partners can keep their own users hungry for more.

“We really enjoy working with Amazon — we wind up working together with them to solve customer problems,” said Bob Muglia (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Snowflake Computing Inc.

Snowflake bills itself as a complete data warehouse built for the cloud. AWS’ style has rubbed off on Snowflake, which now operates with the same constant end-user obsession. “The customer centricity that Amazon has always had is something that we have really focused to bring into Snowflake and really build deeply into our culture,” Muglia said.

It would be nuts not to try the strategy that keeps AWS at number one despite the tireless efforts of competitors like Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. AWS has an easy lead in cloud infrastructure with 35 percent market share, according to Synergy Research.

AWS’ rapid innovation cycle spins on the customer feedback it regards as good as gold. “All the rumors and crazy claims from competitors creates a lot of wasted energy and time, which we don’t pay attention to. Instead, we spend that energy on trying to listen to what customers care about and really inventing and iterating on their behalf,” Jassy said in Forbes as reported by theCUBE host John Furrier.

In like manner, Snowflake consults its customers on decisions about innovation and product development. “We learn from them; we engage with them; we partner with them,” Muglia said in an interview during the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, Nevada. He joined Snowflake customer (nay, partner), Kelly Mungary (pictured, left), director of enterprise data and analytics at Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., to discuss Snowflake’s recent announcement of Snowpipe serverless loading for streaming data. They spoke to Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview with Kelly Mungary and Bob Muglia below:

An end-user’s dream

Snowpipe ingests data into snowflake through a continuous stream. “You simply can drop new data that’s coming in into [AWS objects storage] S3, and we’ll ingest it for you automatically,” Muglia said. This streamlined process simplifies data warehousing, ensuring users get the most up-to-date data for the freshest analytics insights, he explained.

“You look at Snowpipe and what Snowpipe is — that came from customers,” Muglia said. Snowflake does not simply put out a box for random customer feedback; it learns through relationships and understanding what customers actually do, he added.

Snowflake and some additional tools on top of AWS make up what Mungary calls his company’s “dream stack.” It enables diverse staff members — in marketing, sales, accounting, etc. — to perform self-service data warehousing and business intelligence easily. It’s democratized data analytics across the organization so that it’s not just an arcane information technology discussion anymore. “Now we can speak the same language,” Mungary said.

Behavioral data science

Making big data analytics accessible to relative laity lacking data science Ph.D.s is no mean feat. The big data lakes that many companies have amassed can often be an unholy mess to dig through in search of insight.

“It’s kind of like having a huge basement,” said Aaron Kalb, co-founder and head of product at Alation Inc. Companies with data lakes can become hoarders, throwing every scrap of data into cheap storage, he told theCUBE hosts during the re:Invent conference. When business people actually have to find, understand and analyze the data, all those unlabeled boxes piled to the rafters present a time-consuming chore.

“I think the key is to think about how do you make information searchable, discoverable, understandable, trustworthy,” he said.

Alation modeled its data cataloging around the Amazon.com buying experience, with annotations and suggestions based on past behavior related to the data. The way people have used data in the past gives up hints about the way it can or should be used in the present, Kalb explained. This is Alation’s “behavior I/O” in a nutshell.

Alation offers data lake support for S3, which many of its customers use along with Amazon Redshift data warehousing. “Our customers are so smart — we learn so much from them,” he said.

One thing it’s learned is that additional tooling is often needed to make sense of data in the cloud. AWS is tops for containing storage and compute costs, but that does not help business people find out quickly what’s in all those boxes, Kalb stated. “Alation helps with the human side,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview with Aaron Kalb below:

Customer data explodes into cloud

As data volumes continue to explode, demand for scalable cloud storage and accessible analytics will likely rise. Some large companies simply cannot house all of their data on-premises, according to Christian Rodatus, chief executive officer of Datameer Inc. Rodatus knows this, because Datameer’s customers tell him so.

“We get direct feedback from leading customers who do really sophisticated things with Datameer,” he told theCUBE during the re:Invent conference. “They are at the forefront of developing really mind-blowing analytical applications for high-value use cases throughout their organizations. They help us understand where these trends go,” he said.

A global bank in London with whom Datameer works initiated 32 projects with the Apache Hadoop big data framework. According to the customer, “these projects [would] lead to an expansion of the physical footprint of the data centers in the UK by 30 percent,” Rodatus said. Not being in the data center business, the bank made the obvious choice to move the projects to the cloud.

“They launched a massive initiative with Amazon to bring a big chunk of their enterprise analytics into AWS,” Rodatus stated.

AWS partner Datameer delivers analytics tools customers can apply to data in the cloud or in on-prem data centers. “What we provide them is that ease of use, being able to take data from anywhere and be able to use any multiple analytic capabilities within one tool without having to jump around in all different UIs,” said Pooja Palan, senior product manager at Datameer, who also spoke to theCUBE hosts.

Watch the complete video interview with Christian Rodatus and Pooja Palan below:

Analyse this

Data analytics isn’t just for end-user software; vendors can combine analytics with direct customer feedback for a complete market picture, according to Muglia.

“Even at this data-centric company, even where everything is all centralized, I still find sometimes people don’t reference it, and I’m constantly reinforcing that … you’re really smart, you’re really intuitive, but you could be wrong,” he said.

Analytics tools can provide answers in minutes, transforming the way people do business, Muglia explained. “To me that’s about what it means to build a data-driven culture —  to reinforce that the answer is inside what customers are doing, and so often that is encapsulated in the data,” he concluded.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc., Datameer Inc. and Snowflake Computing Inc. sponsored these segments of theCUBE. None of these companies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE