Snowflake launches new industry data cloud for government and education

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Today, data giant Snowflake expanded its product portfolio with the launch of a new industry-specific offering: a government and education data cloud.

Targeted at public-sector agencies at the federal, state and local levels as well as educational institutions, the offering gives organizations a fully managed package of sorts to quickly get started with the Snowflake data platform. This gives teams an easy way to bring their data assets together and build downstream applications relevant to their vertical, right from predictive capabilities to historical trend analysis reports. 

The launch marks the introduction of the seventh distinct industry cloud from Snowflake as it races to draw more enterprise customers and take on competition from Databricks.

Just like the previous industry clouds, the government and education data cloud from Snowflake brings three different elements together: the company’s core cross-cloud data platform to consolidate structured, semi-structured and unstructured data; its own and partner-delivered prebuilt solutions; and industry-specific datasets.

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These elements ensure teams get ready-made templates in one place to jumpstart their Snowflake data cloud instance and quickly coordinate datasets, plus everything else needed for downstream applications targeting different vertical-specific use cases. Without them, teams have to start from scratch and put together everything using their own know-how to get things up and running.

From the perspective of government agencies and educational institutions, Snowflake’s new data cloud will be particularly handy, as most organizations in these sectors struggle with the challenge of disparate data assets and find it difficult to unify, exchange and collaborate on them for improving citizen and student outcomes. When using the dedicated data cloud, they will be able to combine data sources to create holistic 360-degree views of stakeholders, as well as securely share data across teams, between agencies, and externally with the public or the private sector.

“With Snowflake, organizations have the data they need to drive meaningful change in their communities, including coordinating hurricane relief efforts, intervening when a student is at risk for falling behind, and improving community or patient health across public health systems,” Jeff Frazier, global head of public sector at Snowflake, said while sharing some of the use cases.

With the government and education data cloud, users get Snowflake-powered industry-specific applications like those from PowerSchool and Merit, data providers such as Carto and Vantage Point Consulting, and add-on integrations and out-of-the-box solutions from data infrastructure leaders like AWS, Collibra and Immuta. 

In addition, the package includes pre-built solutions from consulting companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte and Plante Moran to help solve for top-priority use cases, including enabling decision dominance for federal customers, modernizing applications for optimal mission outcomes, and providing care for people experiencing homelessness.

While Frazier didn’t specify how many enterprises are using the industry cloud, he did note that the list of industry customers includes K-12 schools and higher education institutions as well as public-sector organizations, including the state of Montana and the city of Tacoma, Washington. 

“Tacoma used Snowflake to unite 25 distinct lines of business. This has resulted in 22-times growth in the number of users across the city with data access and has allowed the city to achieve greater financial transparency with citizens, and power other programs such as utility bill relief for citizens who were experiencing financial hardship during the pandemic,” Frazier told VentureBeat.

The launch of the government and education data cloud is another effort from Snowflake to simplify access to its offerings and build up its customer base across different sectors.

“This year, we responded to customer demand for dedicated industry data clouds with the launch of our telecom data cloud, manufacturing data cloud, and now our government and education data cloud. We’re excited to focus on growing these industry ecosystems and helping customers modernize their respective industries,” Frazier said.

It must be noted that the company is not alone with this strategy. Databricks, Snowflake’s rival, has also been launching industry-specific lakehouses for different verticals. Snowflake first made the move in September 2021 with its financial services data cloud while Databricks joined the fray in January 2022 with lakehouse for retail.

As of now, Snowflake has a total of seven distinct data clouds, while Databricks has five industry offerings.

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Report: Snowflake is in advanced talks to acquire AI search startup Neeva

Snowflake Inc., the cloud-based data warehouse provider, is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire a search startup called Neeva Inc. that was founded by former Google LLC advertising executive Sridhar Ramaswamy.

The report comes today from The Information, which cites people with direct knowledge of the discussions. It says Neeva’s technology could help Snowflake create artificial intelligence-powered search capabilities that would help its customers search for information in internal documents and data.

Neeva was founded in 2019 but first came to attention back in June 2021 when it launched a novel subscription-based search engine that aimed to provide a better experience than Google by stripping out the advertisements from its results. More recently, Neeva has been expanding its search capabilities to answer more abstract queries with the use of generative AI, similar to OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that’s known for its ability to respond to questions and prompts in a humanlike manner. It can also generate new content based on feedback. Its capabilities can be especially useful for search, where users often have abstract ideas about what they’re looking for, such as “Tell me about what stores where I can buy red bouncy balls nearby.”

Google would likely not be able to provide a suitable response to such a query, and that’s where Neeva’s generative AI comes into its own. It says it has improved on ChatGPT, which was trained on publicly available data on the internet as of 2021 and is therefore out of date. Neeva’s AI is able to search the internet as it is today, so the results it returns can be more relevant and up to date. Rather than produce a list of links to different websites in its results, Neeva attempts to provide summarized answers to people’s queries, with citations embedded, making it act more like a real-time encyclopedia search.

The model regularly self-updates, meaning it can surface the most recent information from the Web. However, if it’s unable to provide a summary to someone’s query, it can also fall back on a traditional list of search results.

Neeva, which was valued at about $250 million at the time of its last funding round in 2021, would be a strong fit for Snowflake. The cloud data warehouse giant is said to be keen to integrate generative AI with its own offerings, as it has the potential to increase productivity for its users by reducing the time they spend searching for information within documents. Snowflake is currently at a disadvantage here, as rivals such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp. both provide access to AI software with search capabilities.

Dave Vellante, a longtime industry analyst and host of SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE, said Snowflake has ambitions to become the “App Store for data apps.” As such, Neeva’s large language model capabilities and its vector database would enable Snowflake to support data application development in a simplified way.

“Our fundamental research premise is that applications are moving from being process-centric to data-centric where logic is embedded in the data, not the other way around,” Vellante said. “A capability like this enables Snowflake and its partners to very quickly and simply build apps inside of the Snowflake Data Cloud and essentially become the data App Store. And if Snowflake can enable data app developers to build apps more efficiently and quickly then it can tap the scale and innovation in hyperscale clouds to be the best platform on which to build data apps.”

SiliconANGLE co-founder John Furrier said the emergence of AI with new semantic layers, such as what Neeva is building, is unleashing a transformative wave across the technology industry. “By prioritizing data integration and embedding app logic, businesses can create automated systems that make decisions without human intervention,” he said. “This paradigm shift revolutionizes business operations, enabling companies to achieve unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness.”

Snowflake could have a fight on its hands if it wants to acquire Neeva, however. The Information reported that Neeva has also approached Snowflake’s competitor Databricks Inc. about a potential acquisition.

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Snowflake Debuts New Government and Education Data Cloud

(VideoFlow/Shutterstock)

Snowflake has unveiled its latest industry-specific offering—the Government and Education Data Cloud.

The company says its Government and Education Data Cloud is aimed at empowering educational institutions and public sector agencies at the federal, state, and local levels with a single, integrated, and cross-cloud data platform that enhances mission outcomes and enables public sector organizations to spend more time caring for citizens and students.

To learn more about this launch, Datanami spoke with Jeff Frazier, VP and head of global public sector at Snowflake.

Frazier explained the impetus behind this latest offering: “Snowflake is organized by industries, and the largest category in the world is the public sector. Government and education touch every life in every part of the world.”

The public sector is less competitive than other fields, he noted, and is typically driven by a common mission to serve, educate, and protect. “There’s a natural desire to want to share, to learn, and to achieve,” he said.

Siloed data impacts the real-time decision making process, as the secure exchange of data and collaboration is challenging for organizations that often must share data in an ad hoc way.

“The barrier that the customers are dealing with is they have data that is situated in very different pockets, and they’re unable to make meaning of it because they’re only getting pieces of it, like a mosaic,” said Frazier.

(greenbutterfly/Shutterstock)

Fully leveraging data can improve citizen and student outcomes, but many institutions struggle to unify institutional data including institutional research, student retention, human resources, finance, and student services data. Combining data sources can give a holistic view of citizen and student data that enables a better understanding of the efficacy of services, as well as monitoring for fraud, waste, and abuse.

The City of Tacoma, Washington has already adopted the Snowflake Government and Education Data Cloud. Frazier explained that the city has 21 different organizations, including public safety, power, water, and environmental services, that each has its own way of keeping data, making it difficult to collaborate: “You can’t get a common picture of what’s going on in Tacoma and you can’t share it with citizens, you can’t improve services you can’t see, because they’re all in packaged groups,” said Frazier.

With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, the City of Tacoma has been able to effectively leverage data for uses such as publishing monthly updates on the budget or identifying citizens who might be experiencing hardship to quality for utility relief programs.

Frazier says this is just one example of how organizations are using the unified platform to address their most important issues: “Now they’re putting that across one layer to look at: ‘What’s the impact? How can I help a student? And how can I help childcare? How can I help the policing organizations and health? How do I get a license faster?’ All that is going to be much more efficient and so much faster. The distance between data access and data value is shrinking. And that’s our core.”

Apart from acting as an integrated cross-cloud data platform, the Snowflake Government and Education Data Cloud also addresses the high level of data security and governance needed in the public sector with FedRAMP, DoD, and StateRAMP authorizations, as well as support for regulated customer workloads subject to safeguarding requirements related to Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 1075, and Family Education and Privacy Act (FERPA), to name a few.

(Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock)

Frazier notes that technology companies often must decide between serving the commercial sectors or the public sector due to various market rules, certifications, and investments required. The public sector can sometimes miss out on advanced technologies because of the significant effort required to meet these strict requirements.

Snowflake has made considerable investments to meet the public sector’s rules and requirements, Frazier says, and has focused on categories like disability services, learning and education, information sharing for criminal justice and intelligence services, and other basic government services. The company’s commitment to security, privacy, and compliance has allowed it to invest and refine its product to better serve citizens, he says.

Frazier said he’s seen a pattern of evolving data management strategies being employed in the education sector, from higher education institutions to K-12 schools. These institutions have unified their siloed data into a single layer to make it “uniquely addressable.”

This new data management approach has broken down barriers, Frazier says, enabling institutions to leverage data in ways they previously could not. Institutions can now gain a more detailed understanding of broader issues such as student engagement, risk of dropout, access to free lunches, healthcare access, and more.

New York University (NYU) is another use case for Snowflake’s newest data cloud, where data is being used not only to understand students better but also to engage donors and alumni more effectively. NYU previously used a learning management system that lacked the ability to deliver analytics at scale, but after consolidating its data on the data cloud, the school was able to collect and share data and reports in a timely and user-friendly way with easy faculty access.

Hurricane Ian devastated parts of Southwest Florida last year. (Oana Liviu/Shutterstock).

“Snowflake’s Government and Education Data Cloud has enabled New York University to centralize our data across various Learning Management Systems into a predominantly self-service data platform,” said Satya Kunta, chief data architect & senior director at NYU, in a release. “With Snowflake, we have seamlessly transitioned to utilizing real-time data, enabling simplified access to student engagement metrics for efficient identification of necessary student interventions.”

A number of partnerships also enhance the new Government and Education Data Cloud, including one with PowerSchool, a K-12 education technology provider. PowerSchool’s learning management system, paired with Snowflake, gives institutions a 360-degree view of students.

Frazier’s extensive travels and relationships with different institutions have led him to witness data being used in sometimes surprising ways. An example of this was during Hurricane Ian, the devastating storm that made landfall on the west coast of Florida last year with winds just shy of category five.

Merit is a Snowflake partner with a data platform that uses a SOC2-compliant knowledge graph to verify the identities of those involved with emergency response and recovery. Merit’s identity verification capabilities combined with Snowflake’s ability to move and organize data across clouds enabled a better view of supply chain, logistics, and skills needed to address the emergency situation.

Jeff Frazier, Snowflake’s VP and Head of Global Public Sector.

“When Hurricane Ian hit, they had thousands and thousands of people who wanted to help. And they came in from all over the world to help. And it was difficult to credential people, track their hours, track who they are, track where they should go, what their skills are. It would normally take months to do that. You know what it’s like when you’re in hurricane conditions, how much speed-to-knowledge is super critical to save lives and to help people.”

Snowflake has launched several new industry-specific data clouds this year, including its Telecom Data Cloud and Manufacturing Data Cloud. As each industry has its own ecosystem of software and tools, Snowflake’s approach aims to support the specific outcomes of these sectors by enabling organizations to access data they previously could not.

Frazier says Snowflake is just getting started with mobilizing the world’s data: “This is a commitment to how we’re going to help the world, how we’re going to de-risk, how we’re going to help diplomacy, how we’re going to help to learn and share,” he said. “There are 800 million people every day in the world who wake up and go off to protect, serve, and educate. Our promise is to help them achieve. They deserve that.”

Related Items:

Snowflake Introduces Manufacturing Data Cloud to Empower Industries with Data and AI

PowerSchool Launches K-12 Education Cloud Platform with Snowflake

Snowflake Bolsters Data Cloud Search Capabilities with Neeva Acquisition