University of Notre Dame Deploys Snowflake and Tableau to Help Grow Its Fundraising Strategy

Top 25 US college uses data-driven approach to reveal deeper insight into alumni giving trends


SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 24, 2017) - Snowflake Computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud, and Tableau, a leading provider of rapid-fire business analytics, today announced that one of the nation's leading undergraduate institutions, the University of Notre Dame, chose Snowflake and Tableau to determine who will be its next, likely donors. The university has improved its analytics performance 10-fold and now uses near real-time data to better target its fundraising strategies.

Founded in 1842, Notre Dame relies on its network of 135,000 alumni to help fund crucial research and undergraduate education programs. Understanding alumni interaction trends and finding new ways to keep alumni connected are crucial to Notre Dame. The university built its first data warehouse with a legacy warehouse vendor eight years ago. But the system couldn't scale to Notre Dame's thriving volume and velocity of data -- a result of new, faster fundraising efforts. In addition, queries took 30-90 minutes to complete. These issues and other barriers stalled the university from delivering real-time business analytics, urging Notre Dame to choose a cloud-built data warehouse and business analytics solution to leverage all alumni data, while the data was still relevant.

Notre Dame selected Snowflake and Tableau for exponentially faster access to data and analytics reporting regardless of the volume, velocity or variety of data. Notre Dame can also bring all of its data into one location. This includes loading, integrating and analyzing structured and semi-structured data with little effort -- something its legacy data warehouse and analytics solutions failed at. Snowflake can natively load structured data, and does not require the laborious and costly transformation to load semi-structured data. Today, Notre Dame can load any data into Snowflake without a predefined schema, and query that data using ANSI-standard SQL.

"We looked at a few cloud data warehouse and analytics competitors but confidently chose Snowflake and Tableau," Notre Dame's Business Intelligence Manager, Chris Frederick said. "Tableau is the friendliest way for our business to explore data. When you're lost in a sea of data, a visualization can act as a sort of information map. When combined with Snowflake's speed, we can now explore this information map at the speed of thought and move from data, to information, to a decision, 10 times faster."

Notre Dame continues to be a leader in university fundraising. It is in the top 5% of all universities according to US News & World Report's Alumni Giving Rank. Snowflake and Tableau are excited to help Notre Dame and other universities grow their fundraising with innovative, data-driven strategies.

"Our customers continue to innovate with data in ways they never envisioned before Snowflake," Snowflake CEO, Bob Muglia said. "We are proud to be part of the solution that helps Notre Dame leverage data to raise funds for cutting-edge research and best-in-class undergraduate education."

"Tableau helps people see and understand their data," said Rob Dolan, Education Market Sector Director at Tableau. "Using our data analytics, Notre Dame is able to better understand trends from massive amounts of information so they can make better decisions and act more quickly with regards to donors and increasing funds for education and research."

About Snowflake
Snowflake is the only data warehouse built for the cloud. Snowflake delivers the performance, concurrency and simplicity needed to store and analyze all of an organization's data in one location. Snowflake's technology combines the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. Snowflake: Your data, no limits. Find out more at snowflake.net.

About Tableau
Tableau (NYSE: DATA) helps people see and understand data. Tableau helps anyone quickly analyze, visualize and share information. More than 50,000 customer accounts get rapid results with Tableau in the office and on-the-go. Over 200,000 people use Tableau Public to share data in their blogs and websites. See how Tableau can help you by downloading the free trial at www.tableau.com/trial.

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Media Contact
Eszter Szikora
Snowflake Computing
408-666-5694