4 Key Things to Know About the 10-week DataCloud Launch™ Implementation Timeline

When businesses choose a fixed-price, turnkey solution for implementing Snowflake Data Cloud, their primary goal is often to reduce the administrative burden on their staff – specifically, the time and energy that employees and partners spend every time they interact with data. For many users, this administrative burden can be incredibly time-intensive and downright frustrating. Gartner found that the administrative burden of interacting with an organization’s data ecosystem can add up to a whopping 40% or more of a customer employee’s day. Thus, Snowflake clients have high expectations when they turn to Ippon’s 10-week DataCloud Launch™ solution for implementing Snowflake: Our clients don’t just want to save time standing up Snowflake; they also want to save every user’s time interacting with their own data ecosystem.

Because of the high stakes associated with Snowflake implementation, Ippon clients tend to ask a lot of questions about the specifics of Ippon’s 10-week DataCloud Launch™ offering. Specifically, they want to know what the implementation timeline looks like – so they can prepare their teams accordingly and get the most out of every stage of implementation. For Ippon, these timeline specifics are equally important. In fact, explaining what happens each week is a huge part of the education and outreach that we do prior to implementing Snowflake Data Cloud. Let’s take a look at four key things we want our customers to know about the 10-week timeline associated with DataCloud Launch™: 

1. We devote the first four weeks to understanding your business needs: Many clients assume that a turkey solution can’t possibly be customized for each business. We beg to differ. We devote the first four weeks of implementation to truly understanding each client’s data management needs. In Weeks 1-2, which we call the assessment and discovery phase, we’re working with the client to understand their goals, tech environment, and success criteria. During Weeks 3-4, we are standing up Snowflake, but even then, we’re still working to understand the client’s operating environment – for example, so we can configure RBAC (role-based access control), which is going to be based on the client’s unique business needs.
2. Data ingestion starts midway through a 10-week implementation: By the time we reach the midpoint of the 10-week implementation, we start data ingestion. That may sound early, but for us, it’s critical that we start demonstrating how our client’s data can be effectively managed with Snowflake. We spend two weeks – Weeks 5-6 – doing data ingestion using one data set of the client’s choosing. We help the client choose a data set that’s going to be appropriate and strategic in the long run. Then, we spend Weeks 7-8 preparing a subset of that data for analytics and reporting. By the end of this process, our clients truly “get” Snowflake because they experience it in the context of their own data and their own needs around this data.
3. The final two weeks are spent setting up end users for success: For Ippon, the end goal of DataCloud Launch™ isn’t to stand up the solution that we’ve promised to deliver, but rather to stand up a solution that end users feel confident and prepared to actually adopt and use. That’s why we devote the final two weeks – Weeks 9-10 – to rolling out Snowflake to end users. During this time, we’re carefully monitoring how users respond, and where the client’s user adoption goals are falling short – so we can step in wherever possible to change this trajectory. We also define the next steps during the final two weeks and provide any additional support our client requires.
4. Ippon doesn’t disappear after the 10 weeks are up: Ippon offers a rapid-implementation turnkey offering not because we want a short engagement with our clients, but because our clients want to see results fast. That said, our clients are so satisfied with our expertise and perspective that they often ask us to stay on in some capacity. We are always happy to do so at preferred rates. Moreover, if our clients need to put on the brakes during the 10-week implementation period, we are happy to work with the client to extend the implementation timeline. The bottom line is we are here for our clients over the long run – regardless of whether everything or nothing goes exactly according to plan.

Ippon invests heavily in communicating to our DataCloud Launch™ clients about how specifically the 10-week implementation timeline breaks down. The key things we want every customer to understand about the timeline include the fact that we devote the first four weeks to understanding each client’s business needs, we start data ingestion midway through the timeline, we devote the final two weeks to setting up in-house teams for success, and we won’t disappear as soon as implementation ends.

To learn more about the 10-week implementation timeline for DataCloud Launch™, please visit https://info.ippon.tech/datacloud-launch or contact us here.