Amplitude Announces Snowflake-native Amplitude App: Q&A with Justin Bauer, Chief Product Officer

6 mins

There's no doubt that data is gold to every enterprise. But analyzing mountains of it to divine actionable insight is becoming more challenging by the day. This is where innovators like Amplitude – a leading digital analytics platform – are proving essential to unlocking data-driven decisions.

Now, Amplitude has announced another breakthrough with the launch of Snowflake-native Amplitude, a Snowflake Native App that utilizes Snowpark Container Services – currently available in a private preview. Snowflake-native Amplitude allows joint customers to access self-serve behavioral insights directly within their Snowflake instance.

The news was announced at Snowflake Summit 2023, the cloud data warehouse provider's annual user conference. Amplitude is one of a select group of partners developing Snowflake Native Apps that utilize Snowpark Container Services, and the new capability builds upon Amplitude and Snowflake’s partnership and data-sharing integration.

This application marks Amplitude’s first warehouse-native offering. Warehouse-native Amplitude will help more organizations uncover the behavioral insights they need to make better product decisions without leaving their data platform of choice.

Amplitude also announced several new capabilities, including AI-assisted data governance and automated instrumentation and reporting, to help teams access clearer insights faster.

Unlocking the power of the enterprise data cloud

Based on IDC data, only 32% of the data within an enterprise is being used. Additionally, with the deprecation of third-party cookies, marketers are looking to their data teams to drive more value from their first-party data stored in their data warehouse.

Snowflake-native Amplitude unlocks the ROI of data in the data cloud. Joint customers can now mine additional value from their data by empowering their entire organization with access to self-serve insights from Amplitude — all without leaving their Snowflake instance. Snowflake-native Amplitude also simplifies data governance by using existing Snowflake security and access controls and eliminating the need to store or duplicate data in multiple places.

“Today, siloed data makes it difficult for teams to get the insights they need to drive their business forward,” said Justin Bauer, Chief Product Officer at Amplitude. “We want to make it easier for teams to seamlessly and securely integrate customer and product insights with their Snowflake data. Now every Snowflake customer can unlock the benefits of self-service analytics to better understand each step in the customer journey so they can drive active user growth, increase retention, and improve monetization.”

New features including AI and partner integrations

Snowflake announced the launch of Snowpark Container Services to expand the scope of Snowpark. This was designed to help organizations run third-party software and full-stack applications – all within their account. By accessing and running commercial software and apps directly in Snowflake, customers can seamlessly enhance the value of their data using cutting-edge tools without moving or compromising security.

“We continue to invest in our expansive partner ecosystem, accelerating how users build in the Data Cloud by reimagining what they can run within Snowflake, without tradeoffs,” said Chris Child, Senior Director of Product Management, Snowflake. “With the launch of Snowpark Container Services, we’re making this a reality. Amplitude’s proven track record of helping teams measure and understand customer behavior to improve customer experiences combined with the ease of use, scalability, and unified governance of the Snowflake Data Cloud will help us deliver more value for our joint customers.”

This news comes alongside Amplitude’s announcement of several new capabilities to help technical and non-technical teams gain self-serve access to trusted data and clearer insights. With user experience improvements and automated insights, it’s never been easier to get started with Amplitude. New capabilities and integrations include:

Automated instrumentation & reporting: Instantly track user activity and baseline metrics like daily active users, average session length, and geolocation with Amplitude’s enhanced SDK so teams can start reporting on day one.
Industry-specific reporting templates: Customers can quickly discover product insights tailored to their business with new reporting templates that include industry-specific key metrics.
AI-assisted data governance: Maintain and continually improve data quality with automation and intelligent suggestions.
Expanded partner integrations: Quickly and easily send data to other parts of your stack with new and expanded integrations with Braze, Hubspot, Intercom, Marketo, and more.

“As the amount of customer data within data platforms continues to grow, self-serve access to insights is a must-have,” said David Wallace, research director of customer data and analytics at IDC. “Snowflake-native Amplitude will allow teams to quickly and easily access more of their customer data while maintaining the security and governance benefits within their Snowflake instance.”

As previously noted, Snowflake-native Amplitude is available in preview, and users can sign up for an Early Access Program.

Q&A with Justin Bauer

Following the announcement, we had a chance to connect further with Justin Bauer, Chief Product Officer at Amplitude, to ask a few questions about the new service.

CMS Critic: How big of a deal are the AI capabilities mentioned in the announcement? AI-related features are leading most of the news cycle, and we're curious about how strategic the innovation is, and how it might provide a competitive edge for Amplitude.

Justin Bauer: Amplitude has been early to the AI/ML Game. We have one of the most unique and comprehensive datasets on product and customer behavior, which allows us to develop powerful models that will impact how companies develop digital products. We already incorporate a number of ML capabilities to help our customers identify issues early, predict behaviors and personalize campaigns.

With new advancements in Generative AI, we're looking to help our customers maintain & improve their data quality more easily, generate analysis faster, and even summarize recommendations from their insights. Our new data governance capabilities are just an early example of that. We are also piloting a new feature in beta that uses conversational AI to dramatically shorten the time it takes for Amplitude users to answer questions. They can simply type “How many active users per day?” or “How many users are new versus returning?” into the analysis search bar and generate suggested analyses that help users analyze, explore, and learn.

This is still early days, but we think AI has the potential to accelerate growth in the digital analytics category.

CMS Critic: When will the new service be GA?

Justin Bauer: Snowflake-native Amplitude will be GA in Q1 2024, but all of Amplitude's other new features are being rolled out this week.

CMS Critic: Is there a cost advantage or economic optimization that might be a selling point?

Justin Bauer: Snowflake-native Amplitude has some big cost benefits for organizations because there’s no need for you to export data to Amplitude or build new data pipelines. We run SQL queries directly on the data in an organization's warehouse and provide insights right from their source of truth. Maintaining and managing all of this data directly in Snowflake drives down costs for our joint customers. This process also eliminates the need to move data between systems, so teams can minimize data drift, which is what we call the divergence of two data sets over time. If data drift isn't prevented, it can create big data quality problems down the line.

Another benefit is that we're making it easier for teams to manage data access controls, security, privacy, and governance directly in their warehouse. This means they can lift and shift over to Snowflake more easily, while keeping existing security and privacy controls intact.

CMS Critic: Are the integrations one-click or require additional setup?

Justin Bauer: We can't claim one-click, but how about 3-5? We do everything we can to make these integrations easy to get set up. And they're all configuration based, meaning you click instead of code to get them up and running.

About Amplitude

Amplitude is a leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Almost 2,200 customers, including Atlassian, Jersey Mike’s, NBCUniversal, Shopify, and Under Armour, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey. Amplitude guides companies every step of the way as they capture data they can trust, uncover clear insights about customer behavior, and take faster action. When teams understand how people are using their products, they can deliver better product experiences that drive growth. Amplitude is the best-in-class analytics solution for product, data, and marketing teams, ranked #1 in multiple categories in G2’s 2023 Summer Report.