Salesforce made a significant announcement today with the launch of its Zero Copy Partner Network.
This new ecosystem aims to enable data sharing and integration across different platforms without requiring data copying or movement.
Over the past decade, enterprises have invested heavily in deploying data warehouses/lakes/platforms to consolidate customer information from multiple sources.
Initially focused on a few use cases, this centralized data approach worked well... until enterprises found themselves multiplying such repositories and moving massive amounts of data.
Businesses are looking for alternate approaches.
To make data available across these siloed repositories to multiple applications, some are turning to reverse-ETL (extract, transform, load).
With AI, applications and use cases are getting hungrier for more data, making the problem worse. Additionally, AI requires robust data governance, security, and compliance controls - an even greater challenge with replicated data scattered across the enterprise.
Zero-copy data approaches help address these data-sharing and integration needs without physically replicating datasets.
Salesforce's announcement of its Zero Copy Partner Network is significant due to the initial partners involved - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Databricks, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Microsoft. These companies are leaders in technologies for modern data architectures.
Furthermore, Salesforce's support of the open-source Apache Iceberg format solidifies Iceberg as an emerging standard.
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