Enterprise Strategy Group: Snowflake for Data on the Move

So, welcome. I'm Stephen Catanzano, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. We just finished a great white paper with Quest and are here today with Danny Sandwell, a Quest technology strategist, about moving Postgres and Oracle to Snowflake targets. At Enterprise Strategy Group, in a research survey, we found that 74% of organizations are working towards digital transformation, but only 13% report as being mature. A second survey shows that 54% are focused on becoming more operationally efficient in 2023 as part of the digital transformation strategy. A big part of digital transformation is moving to modern data platforms like Snowflake from solutions like Oracle and Postgres, and that's where we're here to talk with Danny about today. Danny, can you give us your thoughts on what benefits organizations gain from a move from legacy systems to Snowflake? Yeah. And, really, I think it's in support of their overarching goal to support that digital transformation. They've realized they really need to democratize their data, get data into the hands of folks that can make the biggest business impact. And that requires agility and adaptability of the platform you're delivering data from, and Snowflake really fits that need. It's that built-in scalability, so being able to handle the data at scale with a cost-effective model where you can sort of pay as you use it, and only pay as you grow and have more requirements. But there's a lot of benefits in terms of the types of data that Snowflake can bring together, can integrate, and the sort of ecosystem that Snowflake has created with the connections to analytics tools, AI tools. So really, once you put your data into that platform, you have a much easier job of getting it to where you want it to be in the form that it needs to be to really deliver on all the needs of the business and the different use cases that are accelerating all the time. So very powerful platform. And of course, they've done a great job of making sure that it's secure, that it performs, and all of those things. So when you look at that, it just really simplifies and brings a level of maturity to your data capability that's really going to support those democratization efforts. Quest has a number of solutions to help organizations transition, manage, and monitor their Snowflake's environment. Danny, maybe you can describe those for us? Sure. Sure. It starts with SharePlex, which is our data replication and integration solution. This allows organizations to take the data that's sitting in their Oracle and Postgres and actually move it directly to the Snowflake environment without having to lift and shift all of that sort of infrastructure that exists. If they do want to lift that infrastructure, erwin Data Modeler has been the market leader for 30 years now in terms of graphically designing databases, but one of the key things it'll do in this situation is be able to document what you have in your Oracle environment from a schema perspective and redeploy that to Snowflake because it works with all of the database environments. Taking that to the next level would be our erwin Data Intelligence, which is really about documenting your entire landscape, governing that landscape, having observability around the data quality, using AI technology in the background, and then, surfacing that to all of your stakeholders in a self-service way so that they can go and shop for the data that they need, whether it's in Snowflake or any other environment. Our Foglight solutions really are looking at monitoring the performance and remediating and optimizing the performance of all the database platforms you have, including Snowflake. So understanding how that system should be performing and being able to compare that to, maybe, the performance metrics that you had from your legacy systems. And then, finally, Toad DataPoint is a heterogeneous data preparation solution that covers all databases, again, including Snowflake. So as you start to mix data from different sources, be able to cleanse that and share that out using skill sets and technology that a lot of data analysts, data scientists are already used to using it. So it allows them to deliver value on the Snowflake platform much, much quicker. Great. Thanks, Danny. This has been a great overview of the whitepaper. For those watching, please be sure to download the Enterprise Strategy whitepaper, which goes into a lot more detail on the Quest solutions.