Cloud Data Warehouse Migrations to Snowflake: Success Stories from WHOOP and Nexon

Many of our customers — from Marriott to AT&T — start their journey with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud by migrating their data warehousing workloads to the platform. 

For organizations considering moving from a legacy data warehouse to Snowflake, looking to learn more about how the AI Data Cloud can support legacy Hadoop use cases, or assessing new options if your current cloud data warehouse just isn’t scaling anymore, it helps to see how others have done it. 

That’s why we’ve collected these migration success stories to help you get started on your migration to Snowflake. This blog post is the second in a three-part series on migrations. Today we’re focusing on customers who migrated from a cloud data warehouse to Snowflake and some of the benefits they saw.

A consolidated data system to accommodate a big(ger) WHOOP

When a company experiences exponential growth over a short period, it’s easy for its data foundation to feel a bit like it was built on the fly. Data becomes distributed across multiple platforms; different teams end up using different tools. They watch costs skyrocket while performance degrades. 

In essence, that was the story of WHOOP, the Boston-based wearable technology company aimed at enhancing human performance and endorsed by superstar athletes such as LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo. Before it migrated to Snowflake in 2022, WHOOP was using a catalog of tools — Amazon Redshift for SQL queries and BI tooling, Dremio for a data lake, PostgreSQL databases and others — that had ultimately become expensive to manage and difficult to maintain, let alone scale. 

In Snowflake, WHOOP found a simplified, fully managed platform with near-unlimited scalability and strong governance controls — in short, everything its previous system lacked. And the availability of a large network of partners who offer solutions to a whole range of problems has been an invaluable asset. The move itself took just a matter of three months, including the time it took to clean up and organize much of its existing data to set WHOOP up for the future. 

Now, the company is enjoying the benefits of Snowflake’s performance, simplicity and data governance. With separated compute across warehouses, there’s no longer any worry about one team’s queries straining another’s resources, and features such as Iceberg Tables are simplifying pipelines and saving the company money. 

Nexon finds 7x performance improvements by unifying its massive data stores

Founded in 1994, Nexon is a company engaged in the production, development and operation of online games and Virtual Worlds. Serving a company that has games available in more than 190 countries and employs more than 8,000 people, its data engineering team is always running. Processing some 90,000 tables per day, the team oversees the ingestion of more than 100 terabytes of data from upward of 8,500 events daily. So when the company sought to unify all of its data on a single platform, it knew it needed something scalable, reliable, secure and convenient. 

Moving its data warehousing workload from a cloud data warehouse to Snowflake and from legacy Spark to Snowpark, Nexon saw a sevenfold performance improvement, translating to $4.5 million in cost savings annually. With an internal user base of 2,000 — and growing — the company particularly appreciated the seamless data access controls and the ability to securely share data with just a few simple clicks. With Snowpark, Nexon found processing speeds to be equally fast but more convenient and cost-effective since data never has to move off of Snowflake. 

A simpler, better solution 

While a desire to consolidate and make sense of their data foundations drove the move to Snowflake for both WHOOP and Nexon, the companies also enjoyed immediate improvements in performance, ease of use and cost. Snowflake’s deep well of partners and the growing number of tools that integrate seamlessly with its platform offer the flexibility to tackle each customer’s unique challenges.

To learn more about migrating and modernizing your legacy data platform, visit our Migrate to the AI Data Cloud web page or read more customer stories here to find out how companies such as Lucid, Big Fish Games and Business Insider have found success with Snowflake.