Companies approach data transformation from different starting points. For Spark New Zealand Trading Ltd., marketing was the area of concern.

It’s since leaned on Snowflake Inc.’s unified data platform to drive conversions up by 17% and beat down marketing costs by 16%, according to Kallol Dutta (pictured, right), group data and automation leader at Spark New Zealand.

“We are sending too many messages to the customers — can we send the right message to the right customer at the right time?” Dutta said. “For that, we had to get the data together. And we got the data together by [a] unified data platform, that’s what we call our Snowflake instance. We made Snowflake the heart of our data and then we put AI and ML capabilities on that so as to find the right customer at the right time.”

Dutta and Phil Kippen (left), global head of industry-telecommunications at Snowflake, spoke with industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Spark New Zealand as an example of data-driven telecom management. (* Disclosure below.)

Data for a competitive advantage

Spark New Zealand’s strategy is carrying out network planning using data so that it can offer the best possible, most optimized kind of network to a given customer, according to Dutta.

“…We also had to change our operating model in terms of how you enable the data to show up for our customers,” he said. “We essentially partnered with Snowflake to bring in the data capability across [the] B2B SME network. And now we are taking that to finance.“

The telecoms stack is going through a phase of disaggregation, where companies within the space are looking at marrying the product and technology aspects of the business. Snowflake is making concerted efforts to help companies within its ecosystem bridge that networking and data operations gap, according to Kippen.

“Some of our providers have started to look at bringing together product and technology,” he said. “Others have been looking to bring the chief data office closer to the network team. There is a lot of change going on right now and it’s a big shift for sure. It’ll take them a little bit of time to get through that, but that’s certainly what we’re trying to help them with.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE