Piano partners with Snowflake to activate customer data at scale

Digital experience cloud Piano has announced a partnership with data cloud company Snowflake. Snowflake will support the Piano Analytics solution, making it possible to store, share, enrich and activate customer data in the Snowflake eco-system. The partnership is part of the “Powered by Snowflake” program that enables software companies and app developers to build and operate their applications in the Snowflake cloud.

Piano Analytics users are also expected to benefit from faster query times allowing swifter campaign optimization. Piano clients include LinkedIn, Jaguar Landrover and a number of major publishers and networks.

Why we care. We’re curious about the possibility of customer data platforms, and possibly other marketing tech solutions, being outflanked by businesses’ investment in tools like Snowflake. Able to operate in data lake, data warehouse and data mart environments, Snowflake ingests data into a cloud architecture, reorganizes it and provides querying services and analytics. Once a brand makes an IT investment in Snowflake, the question arises whether it would be smart and efficient to duplicate storage for a subset of data — customer data — in an alternative solution where marketing has made the investment.

We expect to see more initiatives presenting ways of activating Snowflake data for marketing purposes.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.