Snowflake Reaches Customers on Azure Marketplace With Zero Engineering

Challenge: Uncertain Outcomes and Resource Constraints

After research into the publishing process for Azure Marketplace, the team at Snowflake realized the effort would not only require engineering resources to build and maintain the various marketplace integrations but would also require a small cross-functional team to create the listing and maintain a new set of workflows.

While Snowflake has teams of qualified engineers building and maintaining the world-class Snowflake platform, the opportunity cost of pulling these engineers from product development to build Marketplace integrations was very high, particularly considering the learning curve investment that was required to gain knowledge of Marketplace integrations and workflows. An internal assessment showed the tradeoff between an internal DIY process and using external providers and concluded the preferred path forward was using an external provider.

But, the question was who to use. Snowflake leveraged its relationships with the hyper-scale cloud providers to seek options for external providers to help with the listing process. Once the review process began, a common theme pointed Snowflake in the direction of Tackle and the Tackle Cloud Marketplace Platform. The final validation point was a direct referral from the Azure Marketplace experts, who referenced Tackle as a top alternative to “do it yourself”.

Solution: Accelerated Time To Market; White Glove Experience from Tackle

Tackle helped Snowflake achieve its goals by reducing the time it took to get the product listed in Azure Marketplace. Without Tackle, the Snowflake team would’ve had to comprehend the requirements to list on Azure Marketplace, schedule the development resources required to do integration work, and perform the actual effort. The Tackle platform integrations saved months of engineering effort.

Snowflake also benefited from detailed guidance throughout the listing process. Questions that arose as the Snowflake team compiled the content required for the Azure Marketplace storefront were either answered immediately by the Tackle team or quickly after Tackle conferred with their contacts on the Marketplace team.

Once the listing was live, Tackle provided a white glove experience on the first private transaction to ensure Snowflake understood the private plan process for Azure Marketplace.

And finally, Tackle provided customized documentation to train Snowflake team members on the process that they could then use with customers to ensure a smooth transaction experience.

Snowflake plans to leverage some advanced features in Azure Marketplace to support different deal structures. While Snowflake may utilize the metered billing capabilities through the Azure Marketplace APIs, they are also considering leveraging Tackle’s “Easy Metering” feature which provides a simplified interface to pass values through to the Microsoft billing service. This enhancement shifts the metered billing capability from an engineering effort to a business operations effort.

Results: Strengthening partnership with Microsoft, expanding collective cloud footprint and customer reach, and meeting the customer where they want to purchase products running on Azure.

The value is both a perceived value by the customer purchasing Snowflake and Snowflake as a partner of Microsoft. Snowflake is providing options to customers to make it easier to justify the initial purchase of Snowflake and to expand consumption of Snowflake and complementary Azure services.

Snowflake is closing deals of all sizes through Azure Marketplace. In several cases, the customer was willing to spend more transacting through Azure Marketplace because the budget was already approved, they could leverage payment terms already in place with Microsoft and the transaction closed faster.

The value to Snowflake of transacting through Azure Marketplace is very high, as it unlocked additional partner benefits like webinars, joint social campaigns, and other lead-generation activities.