Let’s say you are building a house that you plan to put up for sale. You focus on an amazing design, beautiful entry, large windows for plenty of sunlight — things that will create a delightful experience for your future buyer. At the same time, the house also needs less glamorous but vitally important infrastructure, like plumbing, running water, electricity, heating, cooling and so on. Unless you are providing a unique off-the-grid experience, home buyers want all of the main systems to be in place and working when they move in.

Providing SaaS applications is similar — everyone wants an attractive, easy-to-use app — but often the vital infrastructure is missing: Most SaaS products are delivered in an “empty” state. Customers need to move their data to the application and, additionally, may need to integrate it with other applications and data sources before the product can really deliver value. The way traditional SaaS applications are delivered slows down time to value and incurs additional costs for customers and providers. 

When you build applications on Snowflake, you are building your product on the grid — quite literally, actually. Snowflake calls this Snowgrid, a cross-cloud technology layer that interconnects your application with more than 9,800 (as of April 2024) other organizations in the AI Data Cloud, facilitating live connections with your customers, partners and other third-party providers, no matter which cloud provider they are on. Snowgrid allows your application to run at global scale, integrated and connected, so you can deliver a product that’s ready for production when your customer arrives. Coming back to the house metaphor, it’s like flipping a switch to turn on the lights — or in our case, use data.

Want a practical example? Let’s say you provide SaaS products to financial services customers. More often than not, your application will not live in a silo but will need to access financial market data to work effectively. Traditionally, this required prebuilt integrations such as APIs or, for more bespoke feeds, ETL, secure FTP or custom APIs. 

On Snowflake, that integration work is not necessary. Establishing a connection to live data is like switching on a light in a house connected to an energy grid — it just works. 

In a recent episode of the “Data Cloud Podcast,” Duncan Angove, CEO at Blue Yonder, a leading technology solutions provider with an enterprise supply chain platform, elaborated on this topic. “Supply chain applications are very, very siloed,” he said. “You have different application topologies across the landscape, and they are all sitting on data silos. And you end up moving data around and doing transformations. There’s a lot of latency. There’s a lot of inefficiency. And because the volumes are so enormous here, you end up with a lot of batch. It means companies are not as agile as they should be. And that’s the fundamental thing — Snowflake allowed us to shatter that paradigm by almost creating a single database for the world’s supply chains to solve that problem at scale.” 

In addition to providing underlying connectivity, Snowflake’s unique architecture allows organizations to build their products faster, scale with ease and distribute and deliver products securely across global regions. The primary focus of this blog, however, is not the technical benefits but how providers achieve accelerated business growth by delivering data, apps and AI products on Snowflake.

Providers who are delivering data, apps and AI products on Snowflake are unlocking greater market potential in the AI Data Cloud. Startups are closing opportunities in large enterprise accounts and regulated markets, while established providers are accelerating evaluations and completing deals faster across new and existing customers. 

There are a few elements that help providers shorten sales cycles and grow their businesses by delivering their products on Snowflake. As of April 2024, Snowflake Marketplace sees more than 115,000 visitors in an average month (based on February - April 2024 data), while each of the Top 3 listings gets more than 12,000 views per quarter — that speaks to the high level of visibility that comes from offering your products in the AI Data Cloud. On Snowflake Marketplace, users can discover and trial products without any commitments directly in their Snowflake accounts. 

Since products are almost instantly accessible — across clouds and regions — customers see accelerated time to value. Thanks to the way that Secure Data Sharing is architected on Snowflake, third-party data is accessed just as if it was first-party data. Snowflake Native Apps also run directly in customers’ accounts, which means that no data extracts, copies or movement are necessary during evaluation or after contract signature. Access is instant, and evaluations can be completed within days instead of taking weeks or months. 

What does this look like in the real world for real providers? Here are a few examples: 

TransUnion, a leading provider of information services and analytics, created the Data Health Assessment application to help marketers quickly understand how TransUnion’s identity graph and data enrichment solutions can augment and enhance a brand’s first-party data, all within Snowflake. “Customers are finding the identity solutions they need with TransUnion’s TruAudience Identity Resolution and Enrichment app on Snowflake Marketplace," says Michael Gellar, Senior Director of Channels and Alliances at TransUnion. "We’re seeing customers convert at high rates after their 30-day trial, given that the solution is faster, cheaper, and more secure than traditional ETL methods.”

RelationalAI provides customers with a Snowflake Native App that expands the set of AI workloads customers can run in their Snowflake accounts, including graph analytics, rule-based reasoning and optimization. RelationalAI chose Snowflake because Snowflake Marketplace offers the infrastructure for a self-serve motion from discovery to trial to purchase. "The ultimate goal is to get to product-led growth," says Sharieff Mansour, VP of Marketing at RelationalAI. "Since our Native App launch, we've seen customer onboarding increase by more than 10x, and the momentum continues to build."

Omnata, an Australian-based startup that offers bi-directional connectors between Snowflake and more than 15 SaaS applications, including Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk and more, saw a fivefold growth in product installations from Snowflake Marketplace within just six months. At the beginning of 2024, Omnata’s connectors were being installed by 2–3 new customers per week; that has accelerated to 2–3 new customers per day. Instead of having to drive traffic to its website, Omnata can bring its product to where potential customers are engaged already. 

Verisk, a leading strategic data analytics and technology partner to the global insurance industry, first listed data sets on Snowflake Marketplace in 2019, quickly leading to multi-million dollars in recurring revenue. “We recognize that customers want to avoid data movement and prefer operating within their governed Snowflake environment; this is why Verisk has chosen to build on this existing growth and demand by expanding our offerings on Snowflake with our Consumer Identity Resolution and Enrichment app," says Jason Ford, VP of Alliances at Verisk.

B2B procurement processes are typically multistep and disjointed, specifically when it comes to procuring data sets, SaaS applications and AI products. Multiple departments are involved to get data and business teams access to the products needed to accelerate value-creation for the business. Snowflake not only accelerates the evaluation process of third-party data, apps and AI products but also removes procurement blockers to accelerate time to value for customers and shortened sales cycles for providers. 

Whether it is security checks, legal reviews or even having enough budget to spend in the first place, Snowflake offers solutions to reduce friction in the procurement of third-party data products. Snowflake includes baked-in security checks for consumers to trust the apps they are installing while offering advanced protection for the provider's code and IP. Providers can draw on standardized terms of service for their listings that, once accepted, accelerate legal reviews significantly on any additional purchases across providers. 

But perhaps the largest benefit that providers are seeing is the ability to leverage on-platform monetization and the Marketplace Capacity Drawdown Program (generally available in the U.S., private preview in the UK. Program restrictions apply, see documentation for details). The latter unlocks the opportunity for customers to pay for products with a portion of their committed Snowflake spend, removing the need to have additional budget approved for Marketplace purchases. Flexible usage-based and subscription-based monetization models allow providers to uniquely align pricing with the value drivers of their products. 

Kumo AI, listed among Forbes 50 AI startups, enables customers to create predictive AI models directly in their Snowflake environment without having to move any data. Customers can easily purchase Kumo AI’s Snowflake Native App with their committed Snowflake spend by paying directly on Snowflake. Since data does not leave the governance parameters that customers have established on Snowflake, the conversation around data governance, security and privacy is completely changed. Hema Raghavan, Head of Engineering and Co-Founder of Kumo AI, states that “We’ve been able to unlock opportunities with customers and regions where data privacy is a requirement, such as some of the largest fintechs globally and leading retailers in the European Union. The ability for joint customers to use their committed Snowflake spend to pay for Kumo has also helped our team close deals faster.”

As a provider, you want to spend your engineering resources on building differentiated capabilities your customers will love. Not only does Snowflake eliminate the need for data pipelines and integration work between customers and providers, providers also don’t need to dedicate extra resources to maintaining infrastructure or hiring specialized cloud deployment experts to make their products available across different cloud regions. And it doesn’t stop there — Snowflake also provides an end-to-end billing infrastructure for data, apps and AI products. Providers can choose from flexible usage and subscription-based pricing models, while Snowflake enables the billing, payments, reminders, metering and reporting. For providers who have wanted to take advantage of usage-based pricing, Snowflake offers the opportunity to leverage the capability out-of-the-box. 

Omnata, the aforementioned Australian startup, states that Snowflake has allowed it to serve large enterprise clients across cloud regions globally without the need to hire specialized cloud deployment engineers. “We’ve been able to scale up a lean sales and engineering team to serve customers globally on Snowflake, thanks to a fully managed platform that extends even to billing solutions. It allows us to focus our efforts on differentiated features, customer requests and new use cases,” said Chris Chandler, Co-Founder of Omnata. By leveraging on-platform monetization models, Omnata was able to iterate its approach to pricing by aligning it to the value its products deliver to customers. To learn more, watch the on-demand webinar “Implement Your Monetization Model and Pricing Strategy,” featuring Omnata. 

Ready to build and scale your growth? Join the Snowflake Native Apps Bootcamp that takes you from your first line of code to bringing your product to market.