In today’s competitive market, business agility’s a hotter topic than ever.  Responding in an effective way to emerging challenges can literally mean the difference between success and failure.

Toward this end, business data is increasingly leveraged to glean insights about what’s just happened, what’s happening now, and what’s coming down the road.

“What’s become front and center for our customers is the need for trusted data supported by an agile infrastructure that can allow a company to pivot operations,” said Ann-Christel Graham (pictured, left), chief revenue officer at Talend Inc.

Exploring that topic in more detail, Graham and Chris Degnan (pictured, right), chief revenue officer at Snowflake Inc., spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Data Cloud Summit.  They discussed digital transformation, its application in different business and technological contexts, and its power to drive businesses to higher and higher levels of agility — if implemented properly. (* Disclosure below.)

Solving the most challenging problems with data-driven insights

One question on the minds of business leaders: What is digital transformation?

“To our customers, digital transformation literally means staying in business or not,” Graham said.  “It’s that simple. What’s become front and center for our customers is the need for trusted data supported by an agile infrastructure that can allow a company to pivot operations as they need.”

Need is, of course, a top-of-mind concern since March. The pandemic has taught organizations how vulnerable even large and robust enterprises can be, according to Graham.  “Companies that had already begun their data transformation fared a lot better, and were able to … go after what they needed to do to run their businesses better and be able to do so with real clarity and confidence,” she said.

Snowflake has also seen this play out in recent months. The company hosted a COVID-19 dataset within its Data Marketplace, helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation.

“We saw customers that were initially hesitant to move to the cloud really accelerate their usage of Snowflake in the cloud with this COVID data set,” Degnan said. “And then we had other customers that are in the retail space, for example, use the COVID data set to do supply chain analytics. It helped them make smarter business decisions on that. So, I’d say that COVID has made customers that were hesitant to start their journey in the cloud move faster.”

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