Bloomberg, Snowflake ally to accelerate cloud data adoption

Data giant Bloomberg will tomorrow, June 28, release an app in cloud data platform Snowflake’s Native App Framework that will make it much easier for clients to use Bloomberg data to develop and run cloud-hosted data management tools and applications.

Snowflake’s Native App Framework, launched one year ago, enables developers to build and test applications in the cloud. The Bloomberg DL+ Snowflake Native App was developed and tested over the past two months, and allows users to incorporate data from Bloomberg Data License Plus (DL+)—the vendor’s cloud-based data management solution, which delivers more than 40,000 data fields, covering 50 million securities—into those applications, which run within clients’ Snowflake accounts.

Don Huff, global head of client services and operations at Bloomberg Data Management Services, tells WatersTechnology that the move was driven by customer demand to be able to access Bloomberg data in Snowflake’s cloud.

“Our customers want our data everywhere and anywhere,” he says. “We do have customers taking our data into Snowflake today. Now we have a tool to get them up and running very quickly.”

If a firm already contracts to use Snowflake and its app store, the Bloomberg app creates a fresh Snowflake data warehouse to store the data, and Bloomberg enables a Cloud Delivery Manager function within DL+, which delivers data to the consuming application, as set up and configured in the app by the client.

Huff adds that the app will be available to any Bloomberg customer across the buy side and sell side that wants access to its data in Snowflake’s cloud.

The app is intended to complement—rather than replace—its primary data delivery channels, such as the Bloomberg Professional Terminal and its B-Pipe datafeed, and to serve different needs within client firms.

“Our customers have a lot of skillsets and require different tooling. We’re catering to those who know how to set up a data pipeline but maybe aren’t writing Python code,” he says.

“It means a chief data officer can purchase the data from Bloomberg, administer the data from Bloomberg, and deliver the data from Bloomberg—all without leaving their chair, and without having to call IT staff or build an engineering pipeline. And then all their data scientists now have a sandbox of all the data they’re getting from Bloomberg,” Huff says.

In a statement, Chris Child, senior director of product management at Snowflake, says the move will enable Bloomberg “to distribute its app to thousands of Snowflake customers, without these customers having to move or expose their data.”

However, Huff says it’s just as much about helping existing clients make better use of the cloud, faster—and to be able to bridge current and future data operating models—as it is about reaching more customers.

“With big operating model changes and traditional ‘lift-and-shift’ models, there’s a lot of investment that goes into those before you see any value,” Huff says. “The app is designed to allow someone to turn on DL+ and take that into their Snowflake data warehouse, delivering better time to value for customers, and making it easier for customers to access data.”

Huff recalls how one client described moving to the cloud as a 10-mile journey, with the first couple of miles simply focused on making data available. The DL+ app, with pre-modeled data using the “foundation” of Bloomberg’s Unified Data Model—the same data model used across all Bloomberg data products and services—can accelerate them to mile five or six on that journey, to a point where they are more easily able to build use cases on top of the data.

“We’re not just making available the data you purchase; we’re making the data you’ve already purchased easier to use. DL+ makes the data available in a usable, interoperable way, with mature tools,” he says.

Huff says this is the first, foundational step of providing access to data in Snowflake, but that he wouldn’t be surprised if more use cases emerge in the future. In addition, Bloomberg plans to make DL+ available in other cloud providers, to support clients’ multi-cloud strategies, and is talking to third-party application providers about integrating DL+ into their cloud solutions.