Whether you’re a consumer looking for the right energy, telecommunications, insurance, or financial solution, or a journalist investigating those markets, you need accurate and timely data. Verivox delivers up-to-date information to customers and businesses with Snowflake, and monetizes its data by listing it on Snowflake Marketplace. And, with Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities, it also gives press partners access to the information they need to report on market shifts.
Verivox is an award-winning, German comparison platform service for energy, telecommunications, insurance, and financial tariffs. It offers comprehensive details on over 29,000 tariffs—helping give every household extra time and money.
And it’s not just customers that benefit from Verivox’s service. The company also works with press partners to give them the information and analysis they need to accurately report on developments in the energy, insurance, and financial markets. Even consumer-facing businesses use Verivox’s ranking tables and tariff service to get the data they need to identify trends and better understand their customers.
“Prices rose massively during the recent energy crisis,” said Kevin Ruppert, Senior Data Engineer at Verivox. “And naturally there was a lot of attention on the situation from the media. We delivered transparent, up-to-date information to our press partners to help them clearly and accurately present the situation to the public.”
Verivox needs the data it provides to customers, businesses, and press partners to stay up to date and ready to use. And this becomes even more crucial during periods of market disruption. “Naturally, consumers are concerned by energy market developments,” explained Ruppert. “Media companies need frequent access to valid data to keep the public up-to-date with what’s going on.”
Verivox had been providing its press partners with data stored on a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) server. But this server required maintenance, and the data pipeline needed to be managed by the team, taking up valuable time. The server also didn’t integrate well with different programming languages and cloud environments. This meant data often couldn’t be transferred as quickly as partners needed it. Verivox wanted to adopt a faster solution to deliver the most value possible to press partners and business customers.
Verivox needed to adopt a cloud platform with strong data collaboration capabilities and an integrated data marketplace. It has found Snowflake’s managed, modern architecture to be the right fit.
“The company is a long-term Snowflake customer, so choosing it for this use case was an easy decision,” said Ruppert. “The platform is managed, integrates well with AWS services like S3 and Lambda, and you can use SQL for any task. It’s also easier to scale than other solutions—and the fact compute and storage can be scaled independently of each other is a real plus.”
And Snowflake’s collaboration capabilities and reader accounts mean Verivox can give its business customers and press partners access to data without the need to build any pipelines. Now almost 20 press networks and the many subsidiaries that come with them are using Verivox’s data via Snowflake’s Data Cloud to populate dashboards and understand developments in the energy market—and give consumers the information they need.
Verivox also benefited from a great partnership with Snowflake. Verivox’s Snowflake Sales Engineer used their big-picture view of Verivox’s business to connect it with a new press contact—expanding the company’s reach. “He was always ready to help within a day,” Ruppert said. “And you always get a good answer that is exactly on point with what you need. We really enjoyed working with him.”
Verivox also uses ThoughtSpot on Snowflake to give customers access to self-service dashboards, and has plans to carry this over to Snowflake Marketplace to offer raw data sharing. “In the future we’d like to extend this and offer raw data in Snowflake Marketplace, too,” explained Ruppert. “And to offer this for other business lines, like insurance, telecommunications, and finance, as well.”
It also uses Snowflake Marketplace to share energy provider ranking tables, increasing its presence and competitive position. With raw data available in Snowflake Marketplace, Verivox’s B2B customers and press partners can process the data in their own analytics environments to better understand the energy market, and how different providers compare.
As well as using Snowflake Marketplace to attract customers, Verivox uses it to consume weather data that’s vital for long-term planning. Weather and seasonal shifts have a key impact on behavior, energy generation, and costs. And having this data helps the company’s data scientists predict market changes more accurately.
Since adopting Snowflake’s collaboration capabilities, Verivox has seen many internal benefits. It’s experiencing better interoperability with other environments and is using a lot more Snowflake features. “It’s easier to onboard new users with Snowflake,” added Ruppert. “And we can implement new data products faster, too. Scalability has also become more flexible and performance is never an issue.”
Because the whole platform is managed by Snowflake, the team at Verivox don’t need to spend time maintaining and managing the platform themselves. Instead, the Verivox employees can focus on making sure customers have the right data at the right time.
Verivox is also passing the benefits of Snowflake onto its business customers and partners. They can now consume large amounts of data faster and interact with that data in their preferred coding language. The Verivox team doesn’t need to offer as much explanation for how to work with the data platform, as it’s all explained in Snowflake documentation.
“We take customers through the data: what it’s about, what it actually tells you, how columns are defined,” explained Ruppert. “But in terms of interacting with the platform, all the information is already there. We just have to give them a link to the documentation and that’s it.”
As well as extending its activity in Snowflake Marketplace to include data for telecommunications, insurance, and financial markets, Verivox plans to take advantage of additional Snowflake features in the future, including Streamlit in Snowflake. “It’s a nice tool,” said Ruppert. “It would mean we can offer a user-friendly frontend that allows subject matter experts to effortlessly provide data mappings. That would certainly offer a nicer user experience than having departments just deposit CSV files somewhere.”
The company is also excited to get Salesforce data in real time through Snowflake, meaning the team wouldn’t need to manage any pipelines for its Salesforce data. “Cool features are always coming out with Snowflake,” said Ruppert. “So we try to keep up-to-date so we can benefit from them when they arrive.”
“Snowflake really helps us to centralize and simplify things,” said Ruppert. “It’s a true platform for us.”
Learn more about at our webinar, What’s New: Snowflake Marketplace and Collaboration.
The post Verivox Provides Up-To-Date Insights to Customers and Press Partners with Snowflake appeared first on Snowflake.
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