CASE STUDY
Snowflake , the Data Cloud company , has announced it has been chosen by Sigma Healthcare to underpin the company ’ s strategy to improve its data storage consolidation , access and internal data sharing practices .
Snowflake . Key selection criteria included total cost of ownership , required management resources , privacy obligations and the ability to support data sharing and Sigma ’ s future needs , for example , in the area of advanced analytics .
As a leading Australian wholesaler and distributor of pharmaceutical products , Sigma is responsible for delivering vital medicines to consumers throughout Australia within 24 hours of orders being placed Founded in 1912 , the company has more than 1,000 employees and annual revenue for the year ended 31 January 2022 was AU $ 3.4 billion .
“ We had been looking for an alternative to our legacy , on-premise infrastructure that was ageing and no longer able to meet the increasing needs of the company ,” said Dean Reynolds , Head of Data and Analytics , Sigma Healthcare . “ We were also restricted by the fact that we actually had three data warehouses in use which meant our data was very fragmented and siloed .”
A robust data platform scalable for future growth
The Sigma IT team examined a range of replacement alternatives for its data infrastructure before selecting
“ Overall , we were looking to simplify our data infrastructure and ensure it could better meet the needs of the business ,” Reynolds said . “ We quickly determined that Snowflake could readily meet these requirements .”
Reynolds said the fact that Snowflake was designed from the outset for the cloud was an important factor , as was the ability to separate storage from compute resources .
He said : “ We could see that Snowflake could also provide us with the opportunity to work with both structured and semi-structured data within the same platform . It ’ s design also means there is no longer a need for us to undertake indexing , partitioning or compression as that is all handled by the platform .”
The decision to deploy Snowflake was also supported by the ability to operate under a flexible pricing model . This removed the requirement for an initial up-front
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