Enterprise

Snowflake will help BlackRock clients make more sense of their data

The world's largest asset manager will use Snowflake's technology as the basis for a new addition to its Aladdin investment-management software.

Snowflake will help BlackRock clients make more sense of their data

Some of Wall Street's biggest financial services companies use BlackRock's Aladdin cloud service to manage their portfolios and analyze risk.

Image: lo lo

There are meme stonk traders, and then there are BlackRock customers. Those in the latter category will soon be able to use a new data management cloud service built in partnership with Snowflake, the first such collaboration deal struck by the data warehousing darling.

Some of Wall Street's biggest financial services companies use BlackRock's Aladdin cloud service to manage their portfolios and analyze risk. Modern professional investors have a voracious appetite for data that can inform their decisions, and need a sophisticated service that can quickly gather, sort and process reams of investment data, said Sudhir Nair, managing director and global head of Aladdin, BlackRock's technology arm.

The partnership will allow Aladdin users to "combine the multitude of datasets that many organizations struggle to get their arms around today, and at the end of the day, just build, innovate and create analytics reporting in a way that's just much more streamlined than what they've been used to with traditional sort of data warehousing or data management capabilities," Nair said.

Snowflake's technology will underpin the Aladdin Data Cloud, which will be a new option for Aladdin customers later this year and replace the current Aladdin Data Warehouse. This will allow Aladdin users to take advantage of one of the aspects of Snowflake's technology that helped turn it into the biggest software IPO of all time: It is very easy for two Snowflake users to share data with one another, even across different companies.

Even inside sophisticated technology companies, important data tends to settle into different buckets, making it harder to mix all that data and understand the big picture. And on top of this data balkanization, every year brings a new mountain of data to add to the pile.

Financial services companies used to have distinct roles for traders, data scientists and software developers, but "the days of the separation of duties are over," said Matt Glickman, vice president of customer and product strategy for Snowflake. That means investment professionals need to be more involved with data analysis, and making it easier for companies to share data across internal departments and with external partners becomes even more important.

BlackRock is in the process of transferring Aladdin to Microsoft's Azure cloud service, Nair said, a migration that is expected to be completed over the next 18 months. Snowflake runs on all three major U.S. clouds, and customers of one cloud service can share data with Snowflake customers using other cloud services.

BlackRock is also the first company in a new "Powered by Snowflake" effort that the company hopes will bring new business and live up to the expectations set by its record IPO. Snowflake is expected to report its fourth-quarter earnings next week.

 Tom Krazit

Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is Protocol's enterprise editor, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.

blackrock snowflake wall street data service investment aladdin aladdin data cloud
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep Reading Show less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

cryptocurrency blockchain bitcoin lawsuit
sponsored content
Sponsored Content

How is technological innovation breaking down barriers and increasing access to financial services?

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep Reading Show less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
sponsored sponsored content
amazon web services
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep Reading Show less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

aws amazon web services cloud computing analytics data analytics adam selipsky

Farewell from Protocol

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep Reading Show less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

machine learning
Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

mlops ai machine learning
Latest Stories
Bulletins