Much of the challenge of building an ideal cloud lies in knowing how best to implement and manage workloads.

Data clouds help by consolidating key information and making it, and insights derived from it, accessible to any service that can benefit.

“There’s a new demand to understand your customer better and your business better with your traditional data sources and also new alternative data sources,” said Matt Glickman (pictured, left), vice president of customer product strategy at Snowflake Inc.

At Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit 2020, Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, spoke with Glickman and Aimee Irwin (pictured, right), vice president of strategy and partnerships at Experian PLC.  They discussed how the data cloud can redefine and enhance workloads for almost any organization — even in challenging times like these.  (* Disclosure below.)

Transform digitally and reap the benefits

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic was front and center as an emerging challenge.

“The common theme is that those that have successfully pivoted their businesses to digital are doing much better,” Irwin said. “We’ve helped our clients leveraging our data to better understand the shifts in these consumer behaviors and [serve] their customers during this really challenging time.”

Irwin also sees this situation rapidly evolving in months and years to come. “The idea that data can now be pulled into your own business applications the same way that Netflix and Spotify are pulled into your consumer and lifestyle applications is what I encourage everyone to be thinking about from first principles,” she stated. “What would you do in your next app if consumers had access to their data in that app?”

Glickman, too, sees guiding workload implementation based on customer interests as key to business success.

“There’s this massive acceleration to be able to go faster, [to get] an advantage, whether it’s financial services or beyond,” Glickman said. “And in a lot of ways they all are seeing the cloud and services like Snowflake as a way to not only catch up but leapfrog competitors and really deliver a differentiated experience to customers, both internally or externally.”

Like Irwin, Glickman has been a witness to how Snowflake’s architecture helps customers respond to the pandemic.

“As the crisis unfolded, one of our data partners decided to take the datasets about where the cases were happening from the Johns Hopkins and World Health Organization and put that on our platform,” Glickman said. “And it became a runaway hit where thousands of our customers overnight were using this data to understand how their business was doing versus how the crisis was unfolding in real time.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Cloud Summit 2020. Neither Snowflake Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE