Fivetran and Snowflake partner to simplify data management for users – SiliconANGLE

Data management is the bedrock of the artificial intelligence era, so Fivetran Inc. and Snowflake Inc. are partnering to help customers bring their data together by making Fivetran a native application on the Snowflake Marketplace.

Fivetran and Snowflake have a longstanding collaboration, with Fivetran helping deliver data into Snowflake’s cloud platform. The upcoming release of Polaris will allow customers to access Iceberg data from Fivetran.

“Data is at the center, and customers’ enterprise data sits in a variety of places,” said Prasanna Krishnan (pictured right), senior director of collaboration and Horizon at Snowflake. “We and Fivetran are aligned on our vision of enabling you to break down silos between data, bringing together all your data. This is where we partnered with Fivetran to help bring that data into Snowflake so that it’s now available for you to be able to unlock value through AI and apps.”

Krishnan and George Fraser (left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Fivetran, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed data management and the ongoing work to break down barriers between data and the possible impact of AI. (* Disclosure below.)

Data management: Fivetran and Snowflake are committed to breaking down silos

Being able to leverage Fivetran as a native application on Snowflake will give organizations further governance benefits on their data. It will also save them the time-consuming process of re-validating their environment for data coming through Fivetran, according to Fraser.

“There are so many weird things that all these different data sources do, you cannot believe it,” he said. “The real value Fivetran provides is all the people working madly behind the scenes to map out and work around all these funny things that all these data sources do so that you just get a mirror image of your data in Snowflake as though it was born there.”

Snowflake’s Polaris, an open source Iceberg catalog, works with Horizon, a built-in discovery and governance layer, over both data in Snowflake’s native format and Iceberg data, delivered by Fivetran. This gives businesses the freedom to store their data wherever they want, and potentially saves on costs, Krishnan explained.

“What native applications do is really enable you to bring the application to the data, to the customer’s security and governance perimeter,” she said. “We’re enabling customers to run Fivetran’s logic as a native application, within the security and governance perimeter of their Snowflake account, which enables them to speed up procurement, and … giv[es] them the option to use the capacity dollars that they’ve already committed with Snowflake to be able to pay for the application.”

Of course, AI could speed up this process as well, and it is already being implemented, according to Krishnan and Fraser. However, there is still a lot of work for engineers and developers at Fivetran and Snowflake to ensure that the data remains sound.

“When we write a new connector at Fivetran, the scaffold is actually written by a language model, but there always has to be a lot of developer work to go and map out all of the very arbitrary rules that you need to get right in order to correctly replicate data,” Fraser said. “It’s easy to replicate data; it’s hard to correctly replicate data. So, we haven’t seen it turn things upside down for us yet, but we certainly are focused on it and trying to figure out how [AI will] change the data replication business.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Data Cloud Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. and Fivetran Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake, Fivetran nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE