Ascend.io has announced it is making Data Ingestion free for Snowflake users. Data ingestion is the process of receiving and importing data that is later transformed and prepared for analysis.

It is often expensive and complex and can be a barrier that prevents organizations from building data streams and using data analytics for decision making. What everyone may know is that tools that can simplify the process and reduce costs can support data-driven decision making.

Free ingest eliminates the usage fees that would apply for ingesting data into Snowflake. According to the vendor, it is designed to eliminate the cost of the expensive data ingestion process, reduce its complexity and increase data security.

Vendors specializing in data ingestion include Coefficient, Fivetran, Precisely and Wavefront.

Ascend.io’s chief business officer Tom Weeks said data adoption is only a small part of what Ascend.io does. He goes on to say that because customers pay for the time spent monitoring data, orchestrating, converting and delivering, Ascend.io can offer this capability to Snowflake users for free.

“By providing its data ingestion capabilities for free to Snowflake users, the company aims to help them accelerate time to value … but also – no doubt – set the stage for broader cloud adoption for data automation”,

says Matt Aslett, analyst at Ventana Research.

Free Ingest is only available for Snowflake, but has goals to extend the feature to users of cloud storage platforms from vendors like Databricks and cloud computing giants Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft by the end of 2023.

In addition to Free Ingest, Ascend.io’s roadmap for next year includes architecting tools to better enable data grids and data structures, according to Tom Weeks.

The goal is to free up data scientists and IT staff to perform deeper data exploration while leveraging the domain expertise of employees across departments.