Snowflake hits 99% of IT
commit goals with ThoughtSpot for ServiceNow Analytics

Snowflake helps thousands of organizations mobilize their data in the Data Cloud. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. And it doesn’t just deliver best-in-class data products; it runs its entire business on data, too.

At the helm of Snowflake’s 250-person IT and security organization is dual Chief Information Officer and Chief Data Officer Sunny Bedi. In his role, Bedi oversees a range of strategic initiatives including security and access control, data quality, and general system availability and performance. His primary measure for success is ensuring Snowflake’s global workforce of nearly 2,500 employees (as of January 31, 2021) has the right tools and technology to be productive. As the top data leader of a multibillion dollar data platform company, he also plays a significant role in sharing the “Snowflake on Snowflake” story with customers.

As a company, we believe that measuring the right data drives good business outcomes. Being a data platform company, we have to live up to that promise.

Sunny BediCIO and CDOSnowflake

To keep up with the constant barrage of IT and security tickets, Bedi and his team rely heavily on ServiceNow. They manage all of their tickets, end-user communications, change management, and CMDB initiatives through the ServiceNow platform, generating a tremendous amount of data in the process. However, without the right analytics capabilities, making the right operational decisions and improvements based on this data is challenging at best.

Challenge

To support the growing demands of the business, Bedi and his team needed more than ServiceNow’s canned reports and predefined drill paths. Snowflake had recently onboarded more than a thousand employees during the course of the pandemic. And Bedi knew he could either bring on additional resources to help manage the mounting number of devices, IT requests, and help tickets or he could find a solution to transform the way his team engaged with and acted on data. Thus began his search for a seamless, self-service analytics platform.

Pre-canned reports aren’t enough. When you’re living in that world, you’re not taking advantage of all the possibilities your data can lead to.

Sunny BediCIO and CDOSnowflake

Solution

At the top of Bedi’s list was ThoughtSpot. With its many shared customers and complimentary use cases, Snowflake and ThoughtSpot already had a fruitful tech partnership. With up-to-date ServiceNow data directly integrated into Snowhouse, Snowflake’s internal database, Bedi’s team can connect it with other business-critical application data. It also made it easy for Bedi to visualize all the team’s ServiceNow data in ThoughtSpot. And because ThoughtSpot instantly returns customizable visualizations for every insight, the team immediately eliminated time spent creating charts manually, accelerating their interpretation of insights and reducing time to action.

It’s real time, self-service, and in the hands of every engineer. We’re all looking at the data consistently through the same lens rather than manipulating it in PowerPoint or a spreadsheet.

Sunny BediCIO and CDOSnowflake

The self-service capabilities were unlike anything they’d ever experienced, either. With ThoughtSpot, searching for insights went from minutes to seconds. Anyone on the team could easily drill down into the granular details of an IT issue to come up with an actionable solution. And analyzing multiple data sources all in one place made it easy to identify issue patterns or correlations they might have otherwise missed. In Bedi’s own words, data is now at the core of every decision. The team has visibility into baselines for every key metric (e.g., open tickets, closed tickets, speed to close, commit delivery) and when problems arise they can quickly pinpoint where and how to improve.

Impact

Today, when Bedi’s Monday-morning operational review meeting rolls around, everything is happening in ThoughtSpot. His entire team is working from the same set of near real-time data, and they’re working across departments and time zones more effectively, and at a higher velocity, than ever before. As a direct result, the team is now delivering on 99% of commit goals and spending an average of 70% of their time on high-value IT initiatives for the organization — up 20% from before he introduced ThoughtSpot. This is not just a win for Bedi, but for all of Snowflake. With more time to focus on projects that help the business run faster and smarter, Bedi’s team is cementing Snowflake’s competitive edge in the market.

These projects include:

• Automating the employee onboarding experience by ensuring every Snowflake employee has the right hardware, tools, and applications to be productive from day one.
• Providing a consistent, 24/7 service desk experience for the entire organization, raising the bar for first-contact resolution.
• Leading application transformation by ensuring all of Snowflake’s business-critical tools are meeting demands and aligned with business expectations.

What's next

So what’s next? Bedi is excited to continue scaling his team’s impact with the right processes and infrastructure now in place. In time, he’s optimistic that they’ll be able to hit an 80–20 split on transformational versus routine IT projects. And with new self-service analytics use cases popping up all the time, Bedi can’t wait to help every Snowflake employee become even more data-driven.