QlikTech International AB recently announced multiple new and enhanced capabilities within Snowflake Inc.’s Data Cloud. These include new cloud analytics services features like Direct Query, which provideS data leaders with a comprehensive understanding of how to best optimize Snowflake workloads.

The new and enhanced services from QlikTech expand the ability to both seamlessly feed and access Snowflake with near real-time data, as well as creating opportunities for rapid business decision-making across companies.

Poornima Ramaswamy (pictured, right), senior vice president of alliances at QlikTech, and Colleen Kapase (pictured, left), SVP of worldwide partner and alliances at Snowflake, recently spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the growing partnership between the two companies and why real-time data access is so important. (* Disclosure below.)

[The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Talk to us about the QlikTech partnership with Snowflake. What’s it all about?

Ramaswamy: This relationship has been in existence for the last three years. We are focused on making data available for quick decision-making in a timely manner for in-the-moment business decisions. We collaborate really strongly with Snowflake … to make the most amount of data made available on the Snowflake platform in the shortest amount of time so that it’s fresh and it’s timely for business decision-makers to get access to it.

The security piece is absolutely critical. We’ve seen changes to the threat landscape in the last couple of years.

Kapase: It is, and I would say one of the things that has held folks back from moving to the cloud before was governance. So having the ability to extend our ecosystem and work on that governance together gives executives peace of mind that they can easily determine who’s going to have access to what, which makes a transition to the cloud faster. And that’s what we’re looking for, because to have our customers experience the benefits of cloud, and the moving up and moving down from a data perspective, and really getting access to the data cloud — that’s where the nirvana is.

I talk to a lot of C-suite, and the statement of “I sleep better at night” is real. There’s gravity with it, knowing that they can trust where the data is, the access is governed. It just keeps getting more and more critical every day.

Ramaswamy:  I can bring this home with a customer example. So Urban Outfitters is a common customer, and during the pandemic they had to change their in-stores into distribution centers. They had to look at their supply chain landscape, because there were supply chain bottlenecks that are still happening today. So with … the combined power of Qlik and Snowflake, the customer actually was able to make insights available to their in-store managers, to their distribution centers. And from a time perspective, what used to take them days or … even weeks, they’re now able to get data in 15 minutes refresh time. They’re [now] able to predict the supply chain bottlenecks that are coming in.

They’re able to do all of that today, because that power of a governed autonomous environment that we’ve built [with] real-time data, making fresh data available through Snowflake, and easy-to-use dashboards and visualization through the analytics platform.

What you just described, what Qlik and Snowflake enabled there, that could have very well saved that organization. We saw a lot of retailers that were not able to make that pivot.

Kapase: You are exactly right. I think the differentiation on a lot of our core customers together … thriving through the pandemic [was] access to data and supply chain management. And it’s these types of solutions that are game-changing — and that’s why Snowflake’s not being sold just to the IT department, it’s the business decision-makers.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Snowflake Summit event. Neither Snowflake Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE