I'm Ian Mathieson. I work for Powerx, and I'm an IT manager for their data systems team. As an energy trading organization,
data is extremely important for everything we do. It helps inform the market decisions we're going to make, and the markets that we participate in are extremely data heavy and data intensive. So now that we've adopted Snowflake,
really for us, this is a really foundational element for how we want to move forward
with our entire data analytics journey, including very heav
ily on the data governance front. Snowflake provides, out of the box, good performance, easy joinability, but it's really,
for us, providing that platform that we can layer governance on top of now. Being our first foray into the cloud for Powerx, it was really important that we had security lockdown,
that we could answer all the key questions that were going to come to us about this new data platform. And the peace of mind we got from Snowflake
in terms of how they've architected their envir
onment from the ground up,
including tiered encryption keys, and how they rotate them, and how the multi-tenancy works, provided us a lot of security so that we could move forward with the cloud, with this type of platform. The way Snowflake is structured
really allowed us to take that on in a manageable way. So data sharing for Powerx has become an important avenue for us to get data into our organization. We really hope to see, going forward, more vendors and data
being available on the Dat
a Marketplace, as it allows us to get data into our environment and our data life cycle in a trivial way, and get that data to the users quickly. So data science is kind of a new avenue for us, and for us, we're just starting our journey this year. But for us, Snowflake is the foundation for that. We actually feel like we're at the point now where we can start
that data science journey and really build foundationally on Snowflake From an IT perspective, the adoption of Snowflake as a data platf
orm, and shifting our
analytical load from our operational systems or transactional systems to this data platform,
has lowered the number of issues we've had with those operational systems. It's critical that those transactional systems are available 24/7 and aren't impacted by some ad hoc analysis that's happening. And so by the adoption of the Snowflake Data Platform, we've been able to increase the availability
of our key transactional systems. Implementing what we have on Snowflake from a
data platform
is really a foundation now that launches off initiatives around master data management, data
governance, data cataloging, data science. So there's massive opportunities we see with Snowflake as the foundation and as a core element of that.
Comments