Power Holistic Customer Insights with Salesforce and Snowflake Data Sharing-Based Integration

Snowflake and Salesforce have built on our existing partnership to unify the full breadth of customer and business data and generate actionable insights for our customers. We are happy to announce the general availability of Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) Data Sharing with the Snowflake Data Cloud from Salesforce Data Cloud. Organizations can now leverage Salesforce data directly in Snowflake via zero-ETL data sharing to accelerate decision-making and help streamline business processes. 

This disruptive new integration is built on Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Iceberg Tables, and paves the way for a new data integration paradigm that eliminates friction and accelerates time to insight. By combining the full breadth of enterprise data and third-party data from Snowflake Marketplace with customer data from Salesforce applications, customers can now generate rich, holistic insights and build powerful AI solutions to drive differentiated experiences. 

With this first-of-its-kind integration, joint customers can enhance the value of their Salesforce data by combining it with enterprise data in Snowflake. Organizations can now power their Snowflake workloads with valuable customer data and insights from Salesforce Data Cloud. 

• This integration makes it easy to convert data into insights. For example, a retail business can quickly combine its Salesforce sales data with external market trends from Snowflake. This helps them identify changes in customer behavior, allowing for smarter inventory management and marketing decisions, all leading to better customer experiences through AI-driven insights.
• In the coming months, Salesforce and Snowflake plan to launch BYOL Data Federation so Snowflake data can be accessed within Salesforce Data Cloud, completing the bidirectional data sharing capability, to close the loop and facilitate data activation and streamline value for joint customers. 

Engineering teams at Salesforce and Snowflake partnered closely to develop this innovative zero-ETL integration leveraging Snowflake’s Iceberg Tables and Secure Data Sharing capabilities. In order to use the integration, users must have both a Snowflake account and an instance of Salesforce Data Cloud using the “Bring Your Own Lake” feature. The data sharing process is initiated from Salesforce Data Cloud, which lets users bring data from all Salesforce applications and Data Cloud objects into a single, harmonized data estate.

Sharing data from Salesforce to Snowflake is a simple three-step process:
Step 1: Customer provisions a Salesforce Data Cloud instance and selects the Salesforce application cloud objects they want to make available in Snowflake (e.g., objects from Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Services Cloud, etc.), and creates a “Data Share.”
Step 2: Customer selects a Snowflake target account, performs an OAuth against the Snowflake account, validates the target, and creates a Snowflake Data Share target.
Step 3: Customer connects the Salesforce Data Cloud “Data Share” object with the Snowflake target inside the Salesforce Data Cloud experience.

Once the process is complete, the data share automatically becomes available to the Snowflake target account as secure views. Customers can accept the share and start analyzing the data in Snowflake with Snowflake’s security, governance and access control mechanism. This provides a reliable, secure and highly scalable zero-ETL data-sharing pattern. 

This integration is a prime example of the reason for Apache Iceberg’s rapid, widespread growth as the leading open standard for table formats. From its inception, Iceberg was designed to be an engine-agnostic format and not heavily dependent on any single engine, such as Spark or a JVM. Iceberg’s engine agnosticism is what allows Salesforce and Snowflake to easily integrate, and what we think will unlock other similar integrations with many different tools using many different engines.

The introduction of Salesforce’s BYOL Data Sharing with Snowflake provides customers with direct access to data across platforms without the need for traditionally complex Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes. The zero-ETL approach ensures real-time access to the most up-to-date data while maintaining the highest standards of security and governance, while streamlining data management and reducing operational costs.

Early customers have powered a variety of new use cases and gained new insights for their business operations. Joint customers of Snowflake and Salesforce are already using the integration to create tailored customer experiences and accelerate their marketing and business processes.  

There are many valuable use cases for this new integration. Here are five ways customers are already using it to gain new insights and make their business operations more efficient:

• Unified customer insights: Bringing together customer data from Salesforce applications and Data Cloud objects into Snowflake, and combining it with data from ERP and line-of-business applications to create unified customer insights, and act on those insights in near real time.

• AI and machine learning (Next Best Action, Propensity to Buy): Building AI and machine learning models natively in Snowflake to determine customer purchase propensity scores for specific product categories. By joining Salesforce objects such as profiles and website visits with Snowflake’s POS Data and product category data, organizations are able to unlock valuable insights that are actionable.

• Near real-time forecasting: Access to opportunity data shared in near real time from Salesforce and combined with ERP and finance data in Snowflake to build near real-time, end-of-month/quarter/year forecasts that leverage their enterprise data.

• Enriched segmentation that incorporates customer data from Salesforce, product telemetry data in Snowflake, and applied data science algorithms in Snowflake.
• Campaign performance analytics: Merging click data coming from Salesforce with finance data in Snowflake to optimize campaigns by channel.

The solution is multi-cloud by design. This integration is now available in GA AWS us-east-1 (N. Virginia) and AWS EU-central-1 (Frankfurt) Snowflake regions. In the coming months, this integration will be made available in all regions globally on both AWS and Azure.

Interested in using the data sharing integration? Talk to your Snowflake rep, explore the integration documentation, or register for our webinar. Learn more about Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Iceberg Tables powering this integration. We can’t wait to see how you innovate in your business powered by the Salesforce and Snowflake data sharing integration.