Ippon’s Snowflake Concierge Service: Frequently Asked Questions

Concierge is a lightweight managed service that tunes your Snowflake platform to run at its best. Our Concierge also helps your staff keep it that way, provides advice and hands-on help for data governance and integration, and provides access to expert services on-demand and as needed to meet specific challenges or opportunities when they arise. The Concierge has access to and is designed to pull in Ippon’s full global team of experts in Financial Services, Banking, Insurance, and Energy.

We think you should be able to consume expert services in the same way that you consume Cloud services – on demand, when needed, as needed, and only for the tasks that need it most. The Snowflake platform offers incredible value with robust self-service capabilities. Higher-cost services should be focused on adding value to the already competent system instead of keeping it out of trouble. However, customers are traditionally left to seek out experts to boost their team’s efficiency, tackle difficult challenges, and drive precise decision-making. These experts are full-time investments, but their impact comes from a relatively small fraction of that time. With Ippon’s Concierge service, customers gain access to this high level of expertise for a fraction of the cost, where they only pay for the most impactful hours of work that a Snowflake expert provides.

Concierge customers are committing to long-term predictable platform costs and performance, and gaining access to a talent network that provides specific, niche, or hard-to-find expertise as needed when needed. We go beyond only addressing the issues brought up by our customers and bring our experience from diverse project backgrounds to identify optimizations and growth opportunities that you may not even have considered.

While many competitors offer monitoring services, the Concierge service differentiates itself by going beyond alerting and notifying customers of red flags. Our checks are tailored to identify and alert on issues that are specific to your team’s environment. In addition, our experts explain the results and guide you on how to prevent those issues from recurring in the future.

We strive to keep the same expert on your account throughout your engagement with us. Your account will have a primary Snowflake Expert along with a secondary expert if your primary partner is not available.

Ippon’s Concierge service has built-in surge capacity in the event that your team needs extra help quickly, wants to develop a new product, experiments with AI, etc. This is included at no additional charge and is meant to handle incident response-type situations.

Additionally, if help is required that goes beyond the scope of Snowflake, customers have easy access to the entire Ippon ecosystem that consists of experts in data management, migration, AI integration, new products, and change enablement.

Our experts spend the first 2-4 weeks gaining an understanding of your specific goals and pain points with Snowflake. Through collaboration, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of where our focus should be and what matters most to our customers. We also identify any potential areas for improvement and come up with a roadmap to demonstrate how these goals can be achieved.

Participating in concierge will improve the value you receive from your snowflake program. Following an assessment, our team will provide recommendations for hygiene, best practices, team training, tweaks to consider, and ways to gain more insights from your data. Together, our team and yours will set cost and improvement goals that we will reach and sustain together throughout the program term.

Some of those goals will require participation from your team. The concierge program offers recognition to the members of your team that help achieve those goals. Coaching for long-term success is a core value at Ippon, and Recognition Is an important tool in that process. Upon achieving and sustaining goals, recognition will be offered in the form of one or more rewards on your last invoice.

Collaboration is key to success with the Concierge service. While our experts have the experience to identify ways to improve your Snowflake experience, it is important for us to understand what our customer values the most. Because of this, we highly recommend allocating at least one hour a week for our expert to sit in on key meetings or collaborate with your team in other ways.

Yes! The main goal of the Concierge service is to enable your team to become as efficient as possible and maximize the business value of your data. While your team will learn from the guidance of our experts, their allocated time can also be dedicated to one-on-one or small group training sessions to train specific skills for your team.

Our core availability hours are Monday – Friday, and we are planning on adding additional availability in the future. Customers also have access to our experts via a private Slack channel set up for your team.

While this offering is specific to Snowflake, Ippon’s ecosystem includes leaders across a range of disciplines. In the event that challenges arise that extend beyond the scope of Snowflake, we have the ability to tap into this pool for additional help if/when it is needed.