The enterprise quest for a single source of truth involving data took a step forward last month with Snowflake Inc.’s rollout of its Telecom Data Cloud.

Snowflake’s announcement involved the deployment of a fully managed, easy-to-use platform for telco customers. One of those users is AT&T Inc., which is driving a single source of truth for data across the organization.

“People have dreamed of one data warehouse for the longest time and everything in one system, and this is the only way that becomes a reality,” said Roddy Tranum (pictured, far right), assistant vice president of channel performance data and tools at at AT&T. “We can have golden source data and instead of duplicating that 50 times across AT&T, it’s in one place. Everybody leverages it.”

Tranum spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (pictured, second from left) at MWC 2023 during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Dave Whittington (pictured, second from right), assistant vice president at AT&T, and Phil Kippen (pictured, far left), global head of industry, telecom, at Snowflake, and they discussed how Snowflake’s latest offering is simplifying the data infrastructure for telco providers. (* Disclosure below.)

Operational value

AT&T’s adoption of the Snowflake cloud has helped the carrier visualize business information and run queries to find useful patterns without having to spend countless hours on moving data between relational databases and a warehouse.

“We had this monolithic warehouse, we had this file based structured Hadoop, but we didn’t know how to bring this all together,” Whittington said. “We were bringing items over to relational and taking relational and bringing it over to warehouse, and it was a struggle. Now we are able to simplify that environment, and cloud is a big thing with that. You could not do this on-prem with on-prem technologies.”

That simplification has allowed AT&T to focus its IT resources on other areas of the business.

“We’ve gone from 40 data processes down to five steps now,” Tranum said. “Resources that spent all their time on data engineering and moving data around are now freed up to do what they have skills for. That’s some of the great operational value that we’ve seen here. As this simplification happens, it frees up brain power.”

Monetization opportunity

Snowflake’s approach involves allowing service providers to leverage the Telecom Data Cloud and create more personalized data and application service offerings through Snowflake Marketplace. This offers a monetization opportunity for telecom service providers.

“For telecom, very specifically, we’re adding capabilities in Marketplace so that service providers can not only use some of the data and apps that are in Marketplace, but they can go and sell applications or data they had built,” Kippen said. “We’re bringing partners in — technology and consulting and services partners — that are very much focused on telecoms and what they do internally and helping monetize new services.”

In addition to AT&T, other early adopters of Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud include the low-Earth orbit satellite company OneWeb Holdings Ltd. and Singapore digital network operator M1. The offering highlights how major tech industry players are building new tools for the telecom space and forging key relationships as a result.

“The accelerator you cannot change is the relationship we have,” Whittington said. “When tech and business can work together towards a common goal and it’s a partnership, you get things done.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MWC 2023 event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for MWC 2023. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE