Snowflake Announces Data Exchange to Break down Data Barriers

The New Marketplace Enables Customers to Discover, Exchange and Securely Share Data

Snowflake, the data warehouse built for the cloud, announced an all-new shared data experience, the Snowflake Data Exchange, at Snowflake Summit, the company’s inaugural user conference. The Data Exchange is a free-to-join marketplace that enables Snowflake customers to connect with data from providers to seamlessly discover, access and generate insights from data. The technology marks the next step in the widespread use of data as a business asset by breaking down barriers through Snowflake’s secure, cloud-built data warehouse. The Data Exchange is currently available in private preview, with public preview set to launch later this year.

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Unlike traditional data transfer done via APIs or extracting data to cloud storage, the Data Exchange improves control and security related to exchanging data, and makes the integration and query of data seamless. Customers will be able to connect with the Data Exchange easily from their Snowflake account and browse a data catalog to discover and securely access real-time data that they can join with their existing data sets in Snowflake. Customers of the Data Exchange will not incur any data storage fees related to accessing the provider-hosted data.

Data providers can create new revenue streams by sharing live data in a fully-governed way and promote their data services to more than 2,000 Snowflake customers. Providers can make the data available to all or to specific customers without creating copies of the data.

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Weather Source, a provider on the Snowflake Data Exchange, is on a mission to make hyper-local weather and climate data accessible around the globe and across industries. With the Snowflake Data Exchange, Weather Source can now deliver real-time access to weather data sets to Snowflake customers, powering crucial business decisions.

“The Snowflake Data Exchange is a disruptive new technology that will redefine how companies acquire, leverage and monetize data to power their businesses,” said Weather Source CEO Mark Gibbas. “Weather Source is thrilled to be one of the first companies making its data available on this exciting new marketplace and to lower the barriers of access to a continuum of global past, present and forecast weather and climate data that is instantly usable.”

“The Snowflake Data Exchange allows our customers to interchange data in a secure, innovative and friction-free way,” said Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. “Our customers are looking for ways to leverage and monetize their data. Snowflake is uniquely positioned to facilitate secure data sharing between all types of organizations because of our built-for-the-cloud architecture.”

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