Salesforce has a reputation for putting the customer experience at the forefront of their innovation efforts — and Dreamforce is the ecosystem’s launchpad where Salesforce products take flight. In true pre-Dreamforce fashion, Salesforce and Snowflake announced the expansion of their partnership, now enabling customers with the ability to securely share data in real time between platforms without moving or copying data. Salesforce CDP has been the fastest-growing, organically-grown product Salesforce has ever brought to market.
At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce announced Salesforce Data Cloud (previously known as Genie), “a hyperscale real-time data platform that powers the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform.” Salesforce Data Cloud will make real-time customer data points and evolving insights possible, accessible across all functions of the business.
Salesforce Data Cloud supersedes Salesforce CDP, and is based on a new data infrastructure for the Salesforce platform, which we’ll explore now. Let’s dig into how accurate, fast insights for the true Customer 360 vision can be fulfilled.
Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, real-time customer insights… So what does this all mean in practice?
First and foremost, speed to insight and data agility. Traditionally, integrations have required ETL/ELT tools that are not only complicated, but also require monitoring and maintenance to move data between these systems. Historically, this tends to be slow, inefficient, and only allows for the transfer of small amounts of shared data. A significant problem is that integrations that duplicate and move data lead to higher exposure for risk and compliance challenges.
With this new announcement from Salesforce, those challenges become a thing of the past. Now, consumers of data from Salesforce and Snowflake will have instant access to zero copy views of data without brittle and complicated data pipelines. This dramatically reduces the time-to-value for data insights. Further, this partnership moves data innovation closer to the business, where agile data product teams can govern the quality of data, and deliver richer insights using the combined data sets across Salesforce and Snowflake.
Having a single system that provides an industry standard mechanism for data analysis allows business analysts to sift through the data directly and discover insights — without having to translate business needs into costly IT projects. Knowledge sharing and continuity allows quicker iterations of discovery, and accelerates both analysis and innovation as business needs change.
The top-performing companies today excel by meticulously gathering internal data and leveraging the data provided by third-party partners to bring real time data power to customer 360. This partnership allows for that to be even more seamless, with deeper personalization, meeting the ever-changing expectations central to customer experience and relationship management.
Why our team is excited about the power of Salesforce Data Cloud and the amplified combination of Salesforce and Snowflake
The holy grail of CRM has always been to unlock ERP, such that all customer touchpoints can work together seamlessly, thereby providing a differentiated customer experience. This partnership advances that reality. It also unlocks valuable data to be used for AI-driven insights within Salesforce, which is transformative in helping companies shift from reactive to proactive customer engagement.
Atrium is uniquely positioned to help customers take advantage of these new capabilities, as we specialize in driving definable business outcomes and a roadmap for scale at the intersection of data platforms, data science, analytics (whether it’s CRM Analytics, Tableau, or both), and CRM strategy.
On the subject of Salesforce and Snowflake together: “I love the direction things are headed here, with two mega powers joining forces to reimagine how we will work with data,” says Greg Barlin, our VP of Analytics. “I think it’s a harbinger of things to come, where we’ll be able to easily access data where it resides from several places/tools.”
On the subject of Salesforce Data Cloud: “This is a game-changer for Salesforce customers,” says Geoff Birnes, our SVP of Customer Success and Co-Founder. “It enables companies to deliver data-driven business outcomes faster, with real-time access. First movers in this space will create unfair advantages in their markets, and will experience steeper growth trajectories fueled by data.”
As a partner to Salesforce and Snowflake, we focus on end-to-end solutioning through advisory, implementation, and managed services using analytics, AI, and machine learning solutions. To do that most effectively, we combine industry expertise, industry-leading cloud platforms like Salesforce and Snowflake, and data science to help our customers make sense of their data and not only solve problems, connect all your customer data, but also innovate in the process.
Find out how we can help you take advantage of all that Salesforce Data Cloud has to offer.
