Dell Technologies Inc. said today it’s working with Snowflake Inc. on a new initiative to connect data from its on-premises storage portfolio with the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Snowflake Data Cloud is a cloud-native platform that’s designed to eliminate the need for separate data warehouses and data lakes and to share data across entire organizations securely. It gives customers a way to unify datasets from a variety of cloud services and software-as-a-service applications and make it accessible to any user. That data can then be used for data science, analytics and data application development, among other use cases.

Data within Snowflake Data Cloud can be further augmented through the Snowflake Data Marketplace, which allows organizations to discover and consume live data from providers such as FactSet Research Systems Inc., Safegraph Inc., Zillow Inc. and Weather Source LLC, for example.

With today’s partnership, announced at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas (pictured), Snowflake Data Cloud users will soon be able to add data from Dell’s on-premises object storage arrays into the mix, while keeping that information local to meet with compliance and governance regulations. Dell said its work on the initiative should be ready by the second half of the year, when it will announce product integrations and joint go-to-market efforts with Snowflake.

Dell said the initiative is a first of its kind collaboration that will lead to greater flexibility for customers operating in multicloud environments, giving them a way to use on-premises data as if it’s cloud-hosted data, while still meeting their data sovereignty requirements.

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Steve McDowell told SiliconANGLE that while Snowflake isn’t the biggest player in the data warehouse space, it is certainly the one with the most heat. The partnership with Dell will help the company, he said, because where it struggles is in managing customer data from on-premises to its cloud.

“This is where many cloud-based, data-intensive applications struggle,” the analyst said. “So the news that Dell and Snowflake are working together is good, and it addresses a very real need. But it’s impossible to really comment beyond that until we see some details of what they’re working on.”

Although light on details for now. Snowflake does at least promise that the partnership will result in a lot more value for its customers. “This collaboration with Dell will allow organizations to gain more value from their on-premises data while leveraging the performance and simplicity of Snowflake’s platform and the powerful collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud,” said Snowflake Senior Vice President of Product Christian Kleinerman.

Image: Dell/livestream