Zuora Secure Data Share for Snowflake

[dominik_ruf]

Zuora recently introduced their Secure Data Share for Snowflake feature which now is generally available. This basically can replace Fivetran for Zuora if you are on Snowflake. I'm wondering if there are other users with the Zuora / Snowflake combination and if anyone already has any practical experience or spend some thoughts on the pros and cons of either approach to sync your data?

From what I understand from the documentation some differences of Zuora vs Fivetran are:

- Currently there are some known limitations of Zuora: can sync only data from production tenants and currently only syncs transaction currency - HomeCurrency is not available
+ You can save MAR / costs on Fivetran, the Zuora solution is based on size of data being stored in Snowflake and the included (free) amount (depending on your Zuora edition) is pretty huge.
+ It syncs the data in near-realtime (about 10 min in avg.)

Do you see any further pros or cons when comparing those data sync approaches?

[jill-ross]

Wondering if @ogcewell or @rsmurray might have some thoughts on this? 

[ogcewell]

Hi @dominik_ruf , 

How did you get Zuora to pay attention to you? I attempted to go into the marketplace and get Zuora data, but my request sits as 'pending'.  I emailed them directly and it has been crickets.

I am in the process of attempting to get our Stripe data thru Snowflake instead of FiveTran. Our Stripe Fivetran connector is broken and I've been bouncing between the two supports with no help. 

Stripe will charge us to open up the direct pipeline. I'm waiting to get some numbers from our finance team to help determine if it makes sense to go that route versus fivetran.

The reason I'm pursuing this is I'm pressured to lower our MAR cost and been asked to explore alternatives outside of Fivetran.

[dominik_ruf]

Hi @ogcewell ,

thanks for your reply. I haven't tried to actually setup Zuora Secure Data Share - we're still in the investigation phase. But so far I've been in contact with our Zuora Customer Success Manager about it and he was quite responsive - even confirmed it's also available for our Snowflake region which wasn't listed before in their docs, but now it is.

Regarding Stripe: Are you using Stripe as payment provider within Zuora or also independently? As we use it as part of Zuora and I found that the Fivetran Zuora Connector already provides me all the relevant payment data we're interested in so far. I've also setup the Stripe connector but so far we never had a need to use it's data. I didn't analyze this yet, but I wonder which additional data the Stripe connector actually would deliver us which we don't get from the Zuora payment tables (in our setup where Stripe is used within Zuora)?

[seadub]

We've had a mixed and similar experience so far on this topic.  Asked our Zuora Customer Success Manager for info, learned it has an unknown cost, and I haven't yet heard back after several days.

Another "pro" I'd add is the simplified security - no need to embed and manage Zuora credentials in FiveTran, which can add security risks and complexity.  The data is just permissioned from Zuora to our Snowflake account.