Vendor unveils Snowflake Data Exchange, Google Cloud integration

Snowflake Computing Inc. announced Snowflake Data Exchange, a shared data exchange marketplace that will enable secure and easy data interchange between customers and providers, according to the vendor.

With Snowflake Data Exchange, customers can discover, access and generate insights from provider data sets. Unveiled at the company's inaugural user conference, Snowflake Summit, Snowflake Data Exchange is a free-to-join marketplace that intends to improve control and security of exchanging data and make the integration and query of the data seamless.

Data marketplaces, or data exchanges, serve to move data -- anything from BI to patient health information to market data -- between various sources and markets; other established data markets include Microsoft Azure Data Market, Salesforce's data.com, and DataMarket.com.

With data marketplaces, users -- or buyers -- have the opportunity to access new and real-time data streams to predict and create business models. According to Accenture, 4.38 Zettabytes of data are traded yearly; Accenture also predicts that data marketplaces will unlock more than $3.6 trillion in value by 2030.

Snowflake Data Exchange also enables providers to share live data with all or select customers, without creating copies of the data, as well as promote data services to all of Snowflake's customers to create new streams of revenue.

Users can access the Snowflake Data Exchange from their Snowflake account and browse a data catalog to more efficiently discover and access data compatible with their preexisting data sets in Snowflake.

Snowflake Data Exchange is currently available in private preview to select organizations and is slated for public preview later this year.

Also announced at the Snowflake Summit is the vendor's inclusion of Google Cloud Platform in its product offering; Snowflake on Google Cloud will preview this fall and launch for general availability in early 2020. This partnership will allow Snowflake to cater to larger organizations that require flexibility in their cloud strategy while keeping data secure, according to Snowflake.

And, as of Monday, Snowflake is available on Microsoft Azure Government -- the first instance Snowflake is offering in a government region -- despite the fact that Azure Government already offers its own SQL data warehouse cloud service.