Thanks, Andrew Carruthers.
I'm responsible for the corporate data cloud,
which is the conflation of two separate Snowflake accounts,
one for Refinitiv, that we acquired recently,
and also for the Corporate Data Exchange,
which was the piece that I was brought in
a couple years ago, to work on.
Yeah. Cool.
So, maybe let's start talking about the journey
you've had with Snowflake.
So, I guess let's go back to a couple years ago,
two-and-a-half years ago, maybe.
Where was the starting point for us, when John and I
first got to know you and the use cases you have?
So, rather unusually, I had no Snowflake experience whatsoever.
So I had landed a contract working at LSEG,
but with lots of Oracle experience.
And I know that's a bit of another subject.
But the bottom line is that I started with a blank sheet of paper,
but with an objective to take out
what was a cottage industry for reporting.
And over the course of seven weeks,
starting from knowing nothing,
we built out a credible proof of concept
that delivered against the core objectives.
And, in fact, we used that proof of concept.
We vicerated it forward. That now forms the basis
for the delivery into the corporate data cloud.
Yeah.
I guess, in the early days, what was maybe the biggest challenge you faced
as you were trying to get up and running?
Obviously, you tried the technology out.
It was ticking the boxes,
it was doing what we promised,
and you were getting some value.
But, I guess, what were the challenges,
what were the the blockers that you had to try
and address to sort of really start to kick on?
So, I think the biggest challenge, really,
is getting rid of some of the legacy thinking
that comes with knowing a product very well
for many, many years.
So, many of you out there will be very familiar
with your core technologies and looking at Snowflake
and wondering whether you can do the same as what we did.
And the answer simply is yes.
If you have good SQL skills and you have an open mind
and are prepared to rethink some of your approaches,
then you'll find that Snowflake is very eminently achievable for you.
And very quickly. Perhaps more quickly than you think.
I'm not just a fanboy about Snowflake.
I really like the product. It's great.
But it is so easy to start with and build out your competency.
And what I would say is, start with something simple.
Don't expect to eat the elephant in one session.
But start with a theme, work through that theme,
and you'll find you'll discover a whole lot more
about Snowflake than you thought existed.
So, I guess another topic,
I know we spoke about quite a lot in the early days,
was probably the security and governance side.
Obviously, like a lot of organizations,
you have a lot of very sensitive data,
data's a valuable asset,
but it's also something you need to protect.
So, maybe a few comments,
on how we've maybe helped a little bit
in terms of ensuring the security of your data,
but, again, some of the challenges
that we had to meet to give people confidence
that this data was going to be safe
and was easy to govern.
Yes. So there are two aspects to this.
So, the first one is actually embedding Snowflake
as a product within the LSEG infrastructure.
So, that means talking to cybersecurity colleagues,
making sure they're satisfied,
that we've got appropriate controls in place,
and then we've got monitoring and alerting,
around those controls to make sure
that we are compliant with the controls.
And the second part is actually building a platform
on top of the core product.
So, we were building, the Corporate Data Exchange on Snowflake,
whilst embedding Snowflake within LSEG at the same time.
So, some of the challenges that we faced
were around the guardrails for the network policy.
So, what is the allowable IP ranges?
Do we restrict access to on-prem only?
Which is eminently doable, and that's what we've done.
Or do we allow public internet access,
which for one part of our infrastructure we don't.
So, those were some of the challenges we faced.
There's one other thing, as well, that I made the mistake
within the proof of concept of running everything with one role.
But I do urge you, if you're going to go the same route,
please do give some serious consideration
to your role-based access control,
because it does work subtly differently to other databases.
So you can't grant entitlement directly to a user.
It has to be done through a role,
and that will impact your thinking going forward.
And that's the core deliverable, really, of this message:
Your role based-access control is critical to your success.
Don't lift and shift.
Take the opportunity to just rethink what you are doing
in terms of implementing a cloud-based solution.
I guess we have quite a lot of tools in the box
for the security and governance piece.
So, I guess what you're saying is take a step back,
maybe look at what we've got there,
what you can adapt, again,
it can be a tricky subject.
But if you've already got entitlements, models, or approaches,
how can you adapt them?
How can you take advantage of some of the things
that we've got baked into the product?
And, I guess, maybe over the last 12 to 18 months,
you've been leading the charge
on some of the public preview features around that.
Things like the tagging and various sort of things,
So, hopefully we'll keep adding to that.
So, I guess after that initial evaluation, the POC,
we agreed you were going to move with the rest of the use cases.
So, I guess, what did you do then?
What were the next steps about?
You talked about maybe embedding it into the organization.
What happened for the next 12 months
as you were trying to get the momentum going?
As you were moving the use cases onto Snowflake.
So, part of the journey was to actually conduct,
a hearts and minds operation, if you like,
to showcase what Snowflake can do,
what Snowflake can deliver in a pragmatic, practical way.
Always focused around successful business outcomes,
because the people who pay the money for us to do our job,
they don't care what technology
is behind the scenes, particularly.
They just want to know that data is secure, is governed properly,
that they can access the right data in the right timeframe,
that we treat that data with the due respect that it deserves,
and totally compliant, with regulations in force.
But they also want to see,
what they can do with the data going forward.
Now, many of us operate in siloed environments,
which was the theme from the earlier presentation.
And I don't doubt that everybody in this room
has come across situations where you need data from finance or marketing,
and you want to bring them together,
but there are barriers internally,
and what Snowflake has given us,
is the ability to ingest the data,
and in a controlled governed way,
make the appropriate data available
to the right people in the right time.
Yeah. So I think you've mentioned that a few times,
making sure the stuff that you're going after early,
they need to be good use cases that drive value.
That value's then going to build a momentum,
and build people's confidence in the platform
to do some of the things that we've talked about
in the early presentations.
So, that's great.
So, I guess the cloud journey's well underway.
You're trying to get, I know you've talked to me about the ... excuse me ...
the backlog of use cases you're trying to get in.
So, I guess it's really what's next?
What's the sort of medium- to long-term goals?
How do you think you're really going to crack on with this?
And you have got a lot of data,
a lot of use cases you want bring into Snowflake.
What do you think is going to be a critical thing
to make sure that happens, and it happens successfully.
Well, we reached an inflection point
probably three, four months ago,
where one of my colleagues,
who's a business-focused colleague,
he said, "We know Snowflake's secure. We are totally comfortable with the platform."
That hadn't always been the message,
and it was actually quite a revelation,
because at that point you reach an inflection point,
where you're suddenly trusted.
Then you can start to have other conversations.
So, for example, we are talking about a landing zone.
So, that's a centralized provision of Snowflake accounts
throughout the whole of the infrastructure.
We're also talking about a center for enablement,
and that means that we have core competence,
we have skill sets, we have accessible people
who can answer tough questions
that maybe aren't self-evident right at the outset.
So, we're establishing communities of practice,
training guides, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is all part of the maturity of Snowflake within LSEG.
I mean, Andy mentioned the mountain of work,
and it really is a mountain of work.
I kind of liken it as standing at the bottom of the Hoover Dam
with a crack at the top, and it's just about to break.
And that's really a reflection of people coming to us and saying,
"We want to onboard our programs into this common platform
so everybody gets the benefit of these data sets."
Okay. Yeah. Center for enablement, center of excellence,.
I know there's debate about what you should actually call it,
but I guess it's probably worth pointing out.
I mean, you are one of a number of line of businesses
across LSEG, so again, I guess if we're going to really address
that data silo challenge that was called out before,
I guess it's important that you do share best practices
across those teams where you can.
And, again, that's not always easy in large organizations.
So maybe that's definitely something that everybody should think about,
especially if they're in a larger, more complex organization.
There'll be common patterns that can be shared across the board
So, okay. Well, I guess we've kind of gone through the journey.
Maybe if we, as a little bit of a wrap up ...
Given where you are at the moment,
with the stuff that we've got in the box,
the stuff that's available to you,
what excites you about Snowflake now?
And given some of the roadmap stuff that you know
we've got coming down the road,
what are the new features that have come out
in the last few months that you're looking forward to getting your hands on going forward?
Well, Andy, I'm glad you asked me that question.
Anybody would think that we might have prepped that. So let's see.
No, but seriously,
I'm struggling to keep up with the new features.
That's just a fact.
So, please, whoever the product managers are,
stop putting new features into our quarter.
It's a joke.
It's a nice problem to have.
It's a high class problem to have.
But over the past, well, even few weeks,
object tagging has the potential to be a significant game changer,
because it means that our business consumers
can come into Snowflake and they can search by a tag.
They don't have to know
that a particular attribute belongs in a particular object.
They can just search by tags.
There's data classification,
which is an automated object tagging out of the box.
You might want to investigate that.
So, those really interest me.
The other one is unstructured data.
I read something that was actually frightening this last weekend,
that 80% of data that's coming in is going to be unstructured.
And we have to find ways of addressing that data
and allowing our business consumers to merge the content
with our structured and semi-structured data.
Because that's the future.
And these are things like Word documents, PDFs, images,
sensor data, video, all those kind of things.
They're coming at us thick and fast.
Faster than we can assimilate.
So tooling around those is really important to me.
Yeah. The unstructured one was an interesting one.
I mean, we worked together on that.
I think, for those of you don't know, a lot of that went into preview.
Some of it's now in GA. There's also a tie to Snowpark, which Eva mentioned.
But I think the way you went about assessing the unstructured,
when it was in preview was quite interesting.
You work in a highly regulated organization,
so you picked an interesting use case,
but one where you wouldn't necessarily
have to get quite so many boxes ticked to prove the capability.
So, maybe that's another thing that people can consider.
When you're first trying Snowflake out,
and you'rejust getting to know it.
It's back to what you said before.
Pick a use case that's got value,
but pick one that's not going to have the blockers
that means it's six months before you can really try it,
And I think they certainly,
I agree with you,
also you are on the inside,
we have a lot of keeping up to do
with the features that are coming thick and fast,
and it's great that they're lining up with some of your priorities.
So, I guess with that, thanks.
I don't know if you've got any closing comments.
You've gotta earn your money today.
You're on the panel so...
Oh, thanks a bunch.
So, thanks for sharing your insights.
And, again, thanks for the last couple of years.
It's been fun. It's been challenging.
But hopefully you can crack on with that Snowflake journey.
Yeah. I will.
Thank you.
Cheers.