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Dec 13, 2023

Redpoint and Snowflake: No Data Replication and Complete CDP Functionality

According to a report from Sheer Analytics and Insights, the cloud data warehouse market is expected to reach more than $45 billion by 2032, up from $4.6 billion in 2021, representing a nearly 23 percent compound annual growth rate.

There are many reasons for the rise of data clouds such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse, among them improved security and an increased focus on business performance in a multi-cloud environment vs. taking on more IT infrastructure. Companies also recognize the need to quickly activate an ever-increasing volume of data while reducing cost and complexity.

With roughly 20 percent of the market share, Snowflake is the market leader, touted by its approximately 15,000 customers for running in a multi-cloud environment on all major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP), with a usage-based business model that offers unlimited concurrency and a unique architecture that separates storage from computing capability.

What does the prolific rise of Snowflake and other data clouds portend for customer data platforms, the Redpoint CDP among them? Using a CDP with a data cloud is a natural fit for its many benefits in delivering a single source of truth for customer data, but there are considerations to take into account knowing that not every CDP works in Snowflake the same way.

No Data Replication, Better Performance

One question is whether a CDP needs to be composable in a data cloud, or what level of composability is needed. Another is how a CDP in a Snowflake environment handles data pipelines from ingestion to activation.

To answer these questions, it helps to examine the ultimate purpose of a CDP, and how a data cloud helps further those goals. If the core value of a CDP is to bring together all customer data and eliminate data siloes across marketing, customer success and the enterprise, a data cloud becomes a key asset in a few ways.

The Redpoint CDP natively operates with Snowflake as a primary customer database, and existing customers choose this approach for several reasons. First and foremost, doing so achieves the core value of bringing customer data together in a central location and using Redpoint to build a unified customer profile without data replication; no data movement and replication equates to lower cost, better performance and better governance for security and compliance.

Redpoint also offers a unique capability in Snowflake: the Redpoint CDP can connect to an additional database, in a shared Snowflake instance, that provides read-only views to any kind of master data – additional customer attributes, product / supply chain information, locations or other situational details – to complement the core operational, campaign, and customer information in the primary customer database.

By running the Redpoint CDP instance directly in Snowflake, clients control their data unlike in a pure SaaS application, but – as with all data clouds – do not have to control the software. By maintaining data-in-place, clients execute all queries directly within Snowflake, avoiding having to persist data outside of Snowflake.

A Robust, Complete CDP – in Snowflake

In selecting or assembling a CDP in a composable architecture such as Snowflake, marketing and IT need to understand how the different components will work together: What manual processes are involved, how do user interfaces work together, and how are business users expected to perform their day-to-day work? In some “composable CDPs”, core CDP functionality such as data quality, identity resolution, and audience / segment selection may be outsourced to another composable application or service, or may require the marketer to learn coding in SQL, Python, Spark, or other developer-oriented tools. The CDP, in other words, is composable at too low a level, which makes it more difficult and more expensive for marketers to use the CDP for its main responsibility of building and sharing a deep understanding of the customer with consistent, fit-for-purpose customer data.

When the Redpoint CDP is used for data ingestion, identity resolution, segmentation and activation, customers avoid the hidden costs of a composable CDP. Because Redpoint offers composable services and APIs for identity resolution, customer profiles, segmentation, data orchestration and real-time interactions, the CDP brings together the various pieces needed to perform a complete business process or function in one environment. And the Redpoint CDP user interface allows the marketer to monitor and visualize customer data, create and activate audience segments.

Redpoint lets clients configure the Redpoint CDP to run on an existing Snowflake database or by creating a new Snowflake instance, and is the only enterprise CDP that offers the full range of core CDP capabilities that can be run in Snowflake:

  • Automated Data Ingestion and Data Quality: Designed to handle all your enterprise data at the cadence of your customers.
  • Identity Resolution – Tunable for all your use cases while delivering complex and accurate customer profiles using probabilistic, deterministic and machine learning techniques.
  • Segmentation and activation – Using selection rules and models to dynamically and precisely segment your audiences and power superior CX at every touchpoint.

Companies are increasingly adopting Snowflake to optimize use of their marketing technology stacks, lowering costs while increasing efficiency with regard to making the best use of enterprise data. Redpoint is the only enterprise CDP that performs the full breadth of capabilities directly in Snowflake. With no data replication, Redpoint provides an industry-leading unified view of the customer for activation to any end point and for any business or CX use case.

For more on Redpoint and Snowflake, visit “Redpoint and Snowflake: A Winning Combination.”

And to view the recording of “Redpoint CDP x Snowflake: The Framework to Support an Evolving MarTech Stack,” click here.

Steve Zisk 2022 Scaled

Steve Zisk

Product Marketing Principal Redpoint Global

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