Toucan Toco unveils native integration with Snowflake

Toucan Toco on Thursday unveiled a native integration with Snowflake, the first such alignment with a cloud service provider for the startup analytics vendor.

Toucan Toco, founded in 2015 and based in Paris, specializes in data storytelling. As 2021 began, the cloud-based vendor had about 130 customers and generated about $10 million in revenue. Among its growth goals for the year, however, are to increase its customer base to 200 and double revenue to $20 million.

Toward that end, Toucan Toco, which already had an office in Amsterdam in addition to its headquarters in Paris, opened an office in Boston as it attempts to increase its presence in the United States.

Now, with its native integration with Snowflake, the vendor is adding capabilities that will enable customers to more quickly and seamlessly access their data stored in the cloud.

The native integration will enable joint Snowflake and Toucan Toco users to access their data up to 40% faster than they previously could, according to the vendor. With one click, they will be able to work with their data in Snowflake without having to export it first and then return it once they're done.

Motivation for the development was a mix of customer requests to more easily get at data in Snowflake and Toucan Toco's own plans for improving performance, according to Charles Miglietti, co-founder and CEO of Toucan Toco.

"Snowflake has huge traction among our customers, so those customers were asking for something for Snowflake," he said. "So part of [the impetus] came from our customers and leads. The rest came from us … to try to do something with Snowflake way beyond what others are doing."

Beyond easier access to their data, the native integration improves both security between Toucan Toco and Snowflake and the quality of data queries.

To improve security, Snowflake's permission settings now automatically sync to Toucan Toco, which will enable business users to access data without having to first seek permission from third parties such as system administrators. If organizations want additional data security, however, permissions beyond Snowflake's setting can be added to give administrators increased control.

Queries, meanwhile, have been improved through Toucan Toco's dedicated Snowflake Query Optimization Engine. The capability enables users to find, manage and query data models without being required to first reformat data sets. In addition, Toucan Toco's write-back capabilities ensure that customers pay only for what they actually use, the vendor said.

Together, the capabilities included in the native integration have the potential make a significant difference for Toucan Toco users, according to Donald Farmer, principal at TreeHive Strategy.

"There is real substance here," he said. "The security integration, the live data view -- with no offloading or caching in Toucan -- and the ability to optimize queries for Snowflake are all real advantages which should be quite attractive for a lot of Snowflake customers."

There is real substance here. The security integration, the live data view -- with no offloading or caching in Toucan -- and the ability to optimize queries for Snowflake are all real advantages which should be quite attractive for a lot of Snowflake customers.

Beyond the technological capabilities, the alignment with Snowflake -- which has demonstrated explosive growth since emerging from stealth in late 2014 and executed a record-setting initial public stock offering in 2020 -- will benefit Toucan Toco from a marketing perspective, Farmer added.

"It makes a big difference to be able to go to market with a 'joined-up' story," he said. "Toucan Toco sees Snowflake in so many of their opportunities. The Snowflake story -- a cloud-first, cloud-native, multi-cloud data warehouse -- is very attractive to customers. Toucan Toco can complement that with a matching cloud-first, cloud-native, multi-cloud data storytelling play."

Similarly, Mike Leone, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, said that aligning with Snowflake stands to benefit Toucan Toco and its customers.

"Toucan Toco recognizes the power of Snowflake, especially as Snowflake continues to evolve from a modern cloud data warehouse to a comprehensive cloud data platform," he said. "Snowflake has a growing end-user base and is known for simplicity/end-user friendliness. Toucan Toco is looking to empower the non-technical users to gain the insights that matter to them."

Regarding the new capabilities, Leone added that the native integration should accomplish its goal of making it easier for organizations to work with their data.

"When I hear native integration I immediately think about benefits like fast ramp-up, easy to get started, little to no coding, support from two vendors and oftentimes free feature usage," he said.

Now that Toucan Toco has developed a native integration with Snowflake, more such integrations are in the works, according to Miglietti.

The vendor previously developed a native integration with MongoDB Atlas, but Miglietti said it isn't as tight as its integration with Snowflake and there are plans to enhance it to make it more like the Snowflake integration. In addition, in about three months, Toucan Toco plans to unveil a more native integration with AWS that will enable Toucan Toco customers to take advantage of the full spectrum of AWS services. 

Beyond integrations, Miglietti said the vendor's roadmap includes further investments in data storytelling.

Toucan Toco is developing prebuilt data stories for data generated in applications such as Snowflake, Salesforce and ServiceNow that users can install with a single click. Also, it's developing automated data stories built with machine learning capabilities that will generate data stories for end users based on their own usage patterns.

The roadmap sets Toucan Toco up for the continued growth it hopes to achieve, according to Farmer.

"They are going in the right direction," he said. "I am glad they are finding a focus and … it's a good start to 2021 for them. I suspect this will be their breakthrough year."

Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget.