Lessons from the Slopes: Technology, Data, and Agility at POWDR

In this episode of Evolving the Enterprise, Dayle Hall talks with Ana Yakovleff, Senior Director of Enterprise Apps and Data at POWDR, an adventure lifestyle company with ski resorts and experiences across the U.S. Ana shares how her team bridges modern and legacy systems to deliver frictionless experiences for guests and employees alike.

From lift tickets to lodging, ski passes to park concessions, Ana explains how SnapLogic, Snowflake, and Power BI enable real-time insights, automation, and operational agility. She also reflects on her journey from Skullcandy to POWDR, and how collaboration across the ski industry sparks innovation.

We explore the future of enterprise applications in hospitality and outdoor recreation, where AI, predictive scheduling, and integration-first thinking are reshaping how resorts serve guests and employees.

Transcript

Dayle Hall:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our podcast. This is Evolving the Enterprise. I'm your host, Dayle Hall, the CMO of SnapLogic. This is where we're diving into some of the leading strategies and technologies around driving business transformation, everything related to integration, automation, and orchestration across the enterprise.

Joining us today from Park City, Utah, is Ana Yakovleff, who is the Senior Director of Enterprise Apps and Data at an amazing company called POWDR, and one of our customers, very happy to be working with this amazing company. For those that don't know, they are a leading adventure and lifestyle company with mountain resorts and experiences all across the US. Ana is an expert in enterprise integrations, and she's very passionate about putting data to work, streamlining operations, connecting all the best applications, and ultimately, what their goal is, obviously, to deliver a seamless guest experience.

Ana, welcome to the podcast.

Ana Yakovleff:

Thanks, Dayle. Thanks for having me.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, of course.

Ana Yakovleff:

I love talking about this stuff.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. We love having you, and we really appreciate it.

So let's give the audience a little bit of background on who you are, how you got into this kind of position. I love how you're passionate about putting data to work. Was that always something you were interested in? How did you make your way up to this position?

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, that's great. I guess I'll start. I was born and raised in Utah. so I'm a skier and a mountain biker at heart. That's what I spend all my free time doing. Now I have a one-year-old son, too, so I spend time with him as well.

But yeah, ultimately, I worked at a lot of ski resorts growing up and through college, and even after college for a little bit, and then made my way into more of the tech space. I majored in accounting and economics, but made my way into the tech space when I was at Skullcandy. I helped run their website. I started their eBay store, things like that, and then just got into the order processing part of it, the ERP, the fulfillment, so the integrations with our- then it was a cloud-based ERP, SAP Business by Design, and then just got really interested in that part. Also, I got into fraud monitoring, payment processing, that type of stuff.

Then from there, I actually quit Skullcandy for a little bit, then I went back in an IT role. I started as ERP manager, but left there as Director of Enterprise Applications, so similar role to what I'm in now, basically just overseeing all of the applications we use to run the business. And then here at POWDR, I'm also in charge of our customer-facing applications, too, which is more like our point-of-sale applications like Square, and then our ski-specific applications where we sell lift, lesson, rental, it's called RTP. Then I'm also over our NetSuite and our Workday applications.

At Skullcandy, I was there for 10 years. I got really involved with our database, our SQL Server database, and our integration platform. We were using Jitterbit at the time, I helped transition to MuleSoft, I can say. Out of Jitterbit, MuleSoft, and SnapLogic, I would pick SnapLogic over anything.

Dayle Hall:

Perfect. That's it. The podcast is done. That's all I needed you to say.

Ana Yakovleff:

Exactly. I just got really into database management and integrations. I actually, more or less, created this role at POWDR, because I applied for something different, and then the VP of Technology at the time, still my boss, he's now over HR and technology, he was like, you're not really like what this position is, the one that we're hiring for, but I love your background, I love what you're doing. We totally need someone like you at POWDR. So come along for the ride. I've been at POWDR for four and a half years and really enjoying my role. Started with SnapLogic soon after I was hired. I think it was within the first year I was hired, trying to set up for SnapLogic.

Dayle Hall:

Well, I love the fact that you're a native of the area, so you obviously understand exactly how important the customer experience is for POWDR and for those kinds of companies. You mentioned some of the technology background. What is POWDR's mission to provide that experience? And how do you see IT and your role, not necessarily nitty-gritty, but is there a mission of the technology group to make sure that they're focused just as much on customer experience as maybe people that are selling lift tickets or those kinds of things? How do you think about that in your role?

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, totally. That's a great question. The mission at POWDR is inspire human beings with cool experiences and awesome places. As you mentioned, we own ski resorts. Personally, as a ski resort customer, I expect things to just work, right? I go to the website, I buy a season pass, I want it to work. I go to the gate with my season pass, I want it to open, things like that. And then just before I was assigned all that, we also ran some national park concessions. We run the lodging, the retail, and the restaurants at both Death Valley in California, the hottest place on earth, I’m sure most of you know, and then Zion as well, so Zion National Park, we run the same lines of business there.

Basically, what our goal is, to make the consumer experience easy, fast, and fun, whether that's buying a ticket, whether that's parking and going up to the ski resort, whether that's going to the spa, the ski resort, or tubing, or just going in the summer, enjoying a concert, we just want to make your experience better on the technology side.

That's not just guests. Actually, it's also our employees. We moved to Workday last year from an older, antiquated, it was almost deprecated, I should say, our HR platform. So we moved to Workday last year, and that's been pretty amazing for our employees. Obviously, a huge lift on the data integration side, too. It's been very interesting.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, that's good. I've talked to higher ed people on these podcasts. I've talked to global enterprises. What I like about the organization that you're in- obviously, we care about customers, most people care about their customers. But I think you and POWDR have this unique position. A lot of consumers come, you actually see more of the impact. And again, probably your consumers may not necessarily tell you, hey, we had a great experience, your IT team, the technology is working. You just have to assume that. You're still a little bit abstracted from that experience, but it's good to know that your organization is still very heavily focused on that and making sure that our experiences when we come to your resorts are incredible.

Ana Yakovleff:

Totally. And I definitely hear when it's not working from all my friends at Snowbird.

Dayle Hall:

Sure you do. I'm sure that you’re the first person they call.

So talk to me a little bit about that in terms of this industry that you're in, the expertise, there are some specific complexities around data, what data to use, where you can provide a better experience. Talk to me a little bit about some of the complexities that you see in your day-to-day business for technology.

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of the biggest things we've done, and it's mainly to operate our business smarter and just to understand our pacing and everything like that, where we're at on a daily basis, we've put together a lot of automated reports and dashboards using SnapLogic, Snowflake, and Power BI in order to basically put this data in front of everyone, whether or not it is financial data, pacing data, and sometimes operational data, too. That's been a big lift. And we've done a ton of work there.

A lot of the complexities, as you asked, is just connecting to each of our systems, because we try to use best-of-breed applications for everything we have. Like I mentioned, we have all these different verticals. We have food and beverage. We have retail. We have parking. We have activities. We have overnight camps. We have lodging and spa. As you can imagine, there's lots of different applications for all of those. At our size of business, we don't really want to just use one to operate everything because it would be not the best experience.

We have all these different applications. I mentioned Square already is a big one we use. FareHarbor is one we use for ticketing. Stayntouch is a relatively new lodging platform. Whether it's a REST API, or a webhook, or all these different types of integrations, sometimes it's just the SFTP, like file drop, it's been pretty awesome to just have this tool where you can just, hey, I want to call this API, here's a REST Snap, just plug in my credentials, and there you go. There's a lot of complexity, but it's been really nice having this tool that allows us to move quickly.

Prior to this tool, we basically were reliant on all these different third parties to do all of our integrations across the enterprise, whether it's NetSuite integration to our bank, or a Square integration to pull down payment disputes and take it to accountants or something like that. There's so many just simple use cases, but then also larger integrations, too, that we've been able to tackle efficiently and quickly.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. You mentioned a bunch of different technologies there, and again, because you've got a consumer side of the business, and then you're trying to run your own technology internally, everyone wants everything in a solution. I appreciate, again, you're a great customer of ours. But what would you say is the core of what you're looking for? Is it to be able to connect all the sources? Is it speed of integrations and potentially changes? What is the core of what is one of the key things around connecting all these pieces?

Ana Yakovleff:

Ultimately, when we are shopping for something new, say we need a new lodging platform, which is actually the case at some of our properties, lodging, we actually have a lot of different tools we're using now, we need this platform to be a modern application. We need it to, ideally, have a REST API or webhook or some type of way to plug in and grab that data. If it doesn't have that, it's really not an option for us.

And also cloud based, we use SnapLogic’s cloud environment. We actually don't use any on-prem servers for SnapLogic. It just makes the management so much easier. We have all these other tools we use. Like I mentioned, Snowflake is huge. It's our cloud data warehouse. We use AWS, we use S3 for storing credentials, pulling them, the AWS API is calling them via SnapLogic.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Look, again, it's interesting. Different customers have different requirements. If I can paraphrase a platform that at least has the ability to connect to all the modern applications that are out there, because I'm sure there's more coming, particularly with everything we're seeing around AI, I think the flexibility to be able to do that, whether you have on-prem or you’re pure cloud, it doesn't really matter, I think you have to have an integration platform that can scale with you. I think we do hear that a lot. Frankly, it's nice to hear you say it, too.

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, for sure.

Dayle Hall:

Let's talk about the business itself and around expectations with customers and how that relates to some of the decisions you make. You mentioned that you're working on a new reservation system. Do I remember that correctly? So there's new things you're looking at.

How has expectations changed for customers? What do they demand these days that you have to be able to provide? And are there other expectations around your own employees and access the things that they need to do their job better? How have those changed over the years?

Ana Yakovleff:

I could talk about some of our projects that we've done to enable that, and then also some projects that we're currently working on on the horizon. Because we have this best-of-breed thing, and we don't sell food and beverage from our ticketing system anymore, as a passholder or an employee, I would expect to go to Snowbird and get a discount on my burger. And so we had to build an integration to send all this passholder data to Square. That was something we relied 100% on SnapLogic for. We had that integration running. So there's just things like that where, behind the scenes, the customer doesn't realize that these are just totally disparate systems, but they expect these to all come together.

Or with the lodging platform, that's one I mentioned, and that's more of one that's on the horizon. We haven't really dug in yet. Not that people use VroomCharge as much as they do, but just to see everything in one bill and everything. We actually transitioned more from VroomCharge to Apple Pay, and we integrated Square payment processing to our ticketing platform so you could use gift cards and things like that.

Dayle Hall:

Was that just something that, as an organization, you felt you had to do to provide the experience? Did you get customer feedback on those kinds of things? Do you look at other resorts and say, we see they're doing it, we've got to step up, too?

Ana Yakovleff:

The ski industry is really cool to work in because we don't see the other resorts and the other larger companies that own resorts like Boeing and Altera. We don't necessarily see them as competitors. From a tech perspective, we ask them what they're doing and what tools they're using, that type of stuff. We're pretty collaborative that way. It's been really fun. We actually got to go to Powder Mountain, which is owned by Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. He talked about how that's just been so interesting for him, where obviously, if you're in the other videos, online streaming business, you're not collaborating as much as a ski resort.

Dayle Hall:

That's good. I think that's interesting to know. I actually did a podcast yesterday with someone from the education space. It's similar in that the university is not necessarily competing with all the others. They're trying to drive a better education experience, and they do want to be fully occupied as it were. But they said that they are using other groups to share ideas from other organizations. It sounds like you're doing the same thing.

How does that come together? Are there areas? For want of a better word, are there events? Are there online to share ideas there? How does that work in your area?

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, for sure. The thing that we were learning about- one of our applications is actually more of a legacy application, the one I mentioned, RTP. And so there's been a lot of analysis of what else is out there, what else could fit in a ski resort. And one application that's coming up is Axess, which they actually do the gates at the ski resorts and the pickup boxes and stuff. They're just developing new things all the time, and they have a great platform where they're doing point of sale and econ. And so that's something that everyone's checking out, keeping a pulse on, and we're asking each other, oh, is this worth moving to? And if we do, that's something where I'm really excited about because they're basically built for integrations. So we'll be able to pull the data, send the data and all that stuff.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit from the data perspective. So obviously, connecting applications is one thing. And again, I think there's a lot of capabilities within some of the main apps that you have and how we can connect them. But talk to me about, how does your data infrastructure look? How do you make sure that it's set up in the right way? Do you use a data lake to run analytics on? And particularly in your area, how is it impacted by the seasonality of it? Because, obviously, when you're in the middle of ski season, I'm sure it's absolutely crazy. And then does your development vary through the year based on the season?

Ana Yakovleff:

Yeah, for sure. We use Snowflake as our cloud data warehouse. It enables us to do a lot of great things. One is just engineering the data, putting together views and just master data, all these relational tables, all those things. And then it also allows us to do alerting tasks and different things that run. We've actually been using Snowflake since before I started. It's just been a really great tool because it also just plays nicely with our whole stack. So with SnapLogic, you have the Snowflake Snap Pack, and all you need to do is plug in your credentials, and you can write to the tables and everything.

We have a team, I manage a few people here. I couldn't just say that my team makes me look really good because we're always really careful about the way we architect. And I say we, but it's more them with my help, but they're the ones doing all of the work and thinking hard about how we should pull in this data that's real time, or how do we ingest this table, maybe once a day, or bringing it in or scan data or anything like that. That's where we do a lot of our organization.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, that's good. Let's see, I think I'm interested in when you develop, you set certain times of the year to actually do more development work. We don't touch anything during the main season. How do you manage that?

Ana Yakovleff:

I do feel like most of our projects are in the off season, most of our larger projects, but we consider ourselves agile. And we're still continuously doing little improvements and bug fixes or things like that throughout the year. We've built a pretty solid stack for that as well, where we're using GitHub integrated to both Snowflake and SnapLogic. And so we're able to roll back at any time and diversion control, everything like that. So it's a pretty robust CI/CD pipeline, I'd say.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, but you're still prepared for it, I'm sure. How do new initiatives come your way? So if you're looking at whether it's building a new application, again, with AI and the opportunities there, whether you get it from talking to another resort, or you're learning things around your own expertise, how do new ideas come into the center? Did you have a central team? Do you have a steering committee? How do you go through assessments? What are you looking at in terms of new technology?

Ana Yakovleff:

I've been fortunate in my career to work for these companies that are not huge, or not a giant bank or something like that. So I feel like we're the right-size company where I'm constantly having casual conversations with the COO or the head of finance or whoever it is. I think we basically get a pulse on what's important. Sometimes things bubble up because maybe we need to focus more on lodging or lodgings down or something like that.

In general, I feel like we do a great job company-wide of just communicating the different initiatives we have going on. We meet as a company pretty regularly. We're hybrid, meaning we don't really have in-office policy or anything like that, but we stay really connected just with these in-person meetings that we have once a month. I just feel like it's not completely formalized, I guess is the bottom line, but everyone knows what's important, which has been helpful. And I guess that's probably senior leadership, we have a solid senior leadership team that helps us with that.

I’ll also mention that POWDR is constantly changing. It's a family-owned company, and there's lots of different things changing. That comes up where there's just something random that we need to jump on. Like I said, we have an agile team where we can just quickly shift gears. Like we spun Zion up, basically overnight. You have to take those national park concessions. I'm not sure if you're familiar with how the national park concessions work, but basically we put in a bid to run Zion.

There was a company, Xanterra, that ran them for 20-ish years, and then we won the bid. Basically, the government says, okay, POWDR, you can operate this for the next 10 years. And so on New Year's Eve, two years ago, we basically went down there and just turned everything over to our system. So we put everything on Square. We put everything on our lodging platform. There's been things like that where we need to be really quick and adapt our priorities.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. How do you manage that, though? Is it a lot of legacy systems there that you have to- because obviously switching off- one of the biggest things we see with most of our customers, with prospects, is they're trying to move off a lot of the legacy. How does that situation, like with the national park, how much of it is legacy, and how easy is it to just- I appreciate, I'm sure you're making it simple by just switching it off and then switching on to us, but how complex is that?

Ana Yakovleff:

We did it a little differently this time, because we also did the same thing for Death Valley a few years ago, where we just moved completely to different applications. And so with that, there was some data work, like I helped with the lodging reservations, organized those, staged those, so that we could say, all right, here's the data loaded in. It's definitely not easy. It definitely requires a lot of work and a lot of pre-work. I used SnapLogic a lot to stage the data.

I was thinking of another basic example where we used SnapLogic to move our ticketing platform from Zendesk to Freshdesk, and we could just do a simple little mapping and say, all these fields go here. It's not easy, but I guess if you have the right rules and the right people, it goes a lot smoother.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, I'm sure. Obviously, with AI, there's a lot of talk now about the agentic side. But I think one of the things I know you've done, you've had a lot of work on, is just the first part, before you even leverage AI, is just around automations, around things that you're doing that actually help the system regardless of where you use AI in the future.

What have you seen of some of the big wins across your organization around just being able to automate faster and take some of those manual processes out? What are the things that you've seen have had the biggest impact?

Ana Yakovleff:

I think a lot of time, it's just freeing up time to work on things that are more important. So we've done a lot of automations, right? We have some AI in our business, like some snow-making things and other- we've experimented with some data things where you ask Snowflake a question in natural language. And then if it tells you the query it wrote, it gives you an answer, right? And I know there's going to be all kinds of stuff that comes up and stuff we want to play around with in the upcoming year.

Just speaking about automations, and not exactly AI, we've done a lot of cool things from just basic, hey, we need the ticket office to have this file every day of people that are allowed to ski here, just drop it in their mailbox and just make a little pipeline, or send these reciprocal passes, like these people can actually ride their bikes at these other resorts, and we might need these other resorts to know. So let's just send them a file daily. Just simple pipelines that you can build in SnapLogic in like an hour, and you just make it so that people aren't manually doing this every day, every week, or whatever it is.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Sometimes I think as we're talking about so much of the future part of what's coming, you forget that just the core pieces of the platform are just so cool and have such a relatively easy interface. One of the things that we have right now with- I don't know if you've used SnapGPT yet, but it's just something as simple as, describe this pipeline. It sounds like a basic thing, but the amount of organizations that have 10,000 pipelines and the people that built them left three years ago, and they've just sat there, and they're still running, they're still effective, but no one has a clue what they do. So just something as simple as being able to describe that has become one of the key features. And again, it's not whether it's completely differentiated, it doesn't really matter. It's just sometimes you lose sight of the little things that just have such a big impact.

Ana Yakovleff:

I do think all the AI chatbots and everything, I feel like they're only just getting smarter, right? Sometimes you're just like, no, that's wrong, but they're only getting smarter and more helpful. I used it when it first came out and I've used it again, and we could see the difference. That's really cool.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, absolutely. Around some of the things that you've been doing, it doesn't have to be related to SnapLogic, but what have you seen as one of the biggest impacts of something you've worked on, whether it's a new application, connecting all the way through to reservations, or even the lift tickets? Has anything surprised you about something that you've helped to put in place and the impact has just been beyond what you expected? What's one of the biggest things that you're proud of?

Ana Yakovleff:

I think it's probably spinning up Power BI, to be honest. When I came here, we had Tableau. Not that it's not capable of doing everything that Power BI does, it is, but we weren't using it in the way that it helped people. We were just sending static PDFs to inboxes. People couldn't drill in and see details, and they couldn't get reports at the times they wanted them, things like that. We decided to use Power BI just because it fit better in our Microsoft Office stack. And there was just a few other reasons, like usability and building the dashboards and everything.

We had a lot of great data before we rolled out Power BI. We had it all organized. I actually hired an intern to help roll out Power BI, and he's now full-time. He's been here for a few years. He just hit the ground running. Maybe there wasn't a great amount of adoption at first, but now everyone uses it, all the executives, all the managers- not all of the managers, but a lot of the resort managers. Yeah, it's been pretty cool to see where it was like, yeah, I definitely had my hands in that and launched that, just made our data more available.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, that's good. Personally, I love hearing about these kinds of things because, again, even sometimes what you're using a product for, we're a little bit abstracted from it. So being able to hear some of these stories and see what's happening is, like I said, it makes my day.

I mentioned earlier a little bit around the legacy systems, and you've talked about some of the newer systems. Is that an ongoing challenge with POWDR? Are the things that you've had to modernize? Is it a big challenge? And legacy, I'm not talking about 40-year-old systems from IBM, but anything that is still hard to run, hard to connect. How do you approach that? And is it just in the same way as a new application, or are there other things you have to think about?

Ana Yakovleff:

I just keep thinking about the bread-and-butter product. The products that we sell are lift, lesson, and rentals. Actually, it is 40-, so maybe not that old. It's older, though. Actually, it was developed by a couple of employees that used to work at Vale, and they spun off and made their own. Vale's got all this proprietary software that they build in-house. Yeah, this product was ultimately developed by some Vale employees.

It does really specific things to skiing, like access control and bundling where you want to buy lift, lesson, and rental, and even logging all together in a single transaction. It's been something that we have full access to the database because it's an on-prem product, so we can just run queries and everything. But it's also you have to think about that it's not walled like a modern application, so we can't just hit the database a bunch because it's something that's used real time. You can't cause performance issues and everything like that.

So yeah, there's just different ways or different approaches, I should say, to deal with applications that are just not as modern, and just think about the way that things you do could be pretty detrimental. And then I constantly think about the future and what we want to move to. We actually have somewhat of a road map in place, a future road map. That is one of the things that I work with or pay attention to on a pretty frequent basis.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. So in terms of new applications or new innovations, new technology, what is it- and I keep mentioning AI because it is becoming such a big piece. What are you looking forward to? What are the technologies that you're seeing? How are you assessing what your organization could potentially do with some of the emerging trends and technologies around AI?

Ana Yakovleff:

I think from a back-of-house standpoint, like more with NetSuite and Workday and everything, we're doing some really cool projects there with scheduling, predictive scheduling for scheduling your hourly workers. NetSuite's got a lot of cool features in our FloQast software where we do some AI stuff to say, what do these accountants need to check out, what's not adding up, suggest what we should go fix, things like that. There's little features, I should say, that are currently available and that we keep rolling out. But then there's also brand-new things where we want to get these features out or check out and evaluate whether it makes sense for our business.

And I do think it probably is pretty important just to stay on top of all of these vendors that we have and just understand what comes out with all these new releases. With Square, for example, I'm going to a conference where they're talking about AI with their point of sale. It's just interesting that you always need to be up on, what versions are available? What are they rolling out? What features are they rolling out that make sense? SnapLogic, too, there's always new stuff that's coming out, and you want to read the release notes and everything.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, I can imagine with all those technologies, you've got to stay on top of it. However you take on whatever the new type of technology is, where do those things come from? We talked about how you bring in new technologies, but when you're looking to create ideas, could it come from you? Is it through the senior leaders? How does your organization promote that kind of future innovation thinking?

Ana Yakovleff:

It really could come from anyone. We have some business analysts at each of our resorts, and they come up with ideas of, oh, we'd like to see this. We'd like to build this snow report for ski patrol or something like that. I feel like that's a nice thing about our organization, too. It's pretty open, it's pretty collaborative, and there's new ideas that come out all the time.

Just the other day, I took a call with a company called Mappy, where they're doing geospatial metrics and where do people move around your resort. They have this cool product to ingest data from all these different sources and give you some interesting dashboards about where people are going and what that could inform. Should we build another day lodge here? Should we direct people on this run because there's too many accidents on this ski run or something? The possibilities are endless for sure.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Is there a process for prioritization? Because I can imagine, again, with all the technologies you mentioned, the systems that you have are already doing a ton of development and updates. How do you prioritize that internally, what to focus on and which to do first?

Ana Yakovleff:

In the past, we've done a few different things. It's more kind of experimental, but like I said earlier, too, it's to a point where it's the right-size company where you just know. But also we've done different methods. We've played this game called priority poker, where you have a bunch of different stakeholders in the room and they rate things based on speed and agility, or value to customer or employee, things like that. So we've done some exercises like that as well, which has been interesting.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, that's cool. We could talk a lot more, I know that for a fact. But I think what I like to do is- we come towards the end of these episodes. What I think is interesting for people that listen to these podcasts is they're thinking about what the future holds. The reason I asked the question around prioritizing technology and innovation is a lot of people have the same kind of challenges, so it's interesting to hear how you think about prioritizing.

In terms of something within the next, I don't want to necessarily say a timeframe, but 12 months, or 2 years, or even 5 years, of all the things that you're thinking about for the future, on the horizon for your resort, your company, potentially with technology, what's the thing that you look at and you're either excited to see come to fruition, to work on, to build? What is that thing that you're like, yeah, we're going to do this in 12 months and it's going to be the coolest thing ever?

Ana Yakovleff:

I think it's about enabling individuals to move quicker with things like you mentioned, like the SnapLogic GPT and things like that, where it just makes it easier for anyone to learn. You don't have to be a full-on coder to build an integration. I think it's about just being able to move quicker and build- not just quicker, too, but also build something that's sustainable and is not going to break, and something that can also monitor all of your work and tell you when there's things that aren't working properly.

I think that's what I'm excited about, is I think just the speed of innovation in the future. Things like ERPs are actually really interesting to me because I've been an ERP manager. It's something that is so boring to other people, but I find it really fascinating. Something like an ERP migration could take a year or years to do, but in the future, I don't think it will. Those systems will get smarter. Maybe it doesn't seem like they're getting smarter faster, but yeah, that's what excites me, which sounds pretty nerdy when I say it.

Dayle Hall:

No, it's just nerdy enough. It's perfect. And I guarantee whilst some of the customers that you have at POWDR, they may not appreciate what you just said, but if they're going to get a better experience and it's going to make their experience more efficient, they're going to be happy. So I think you have the right mentality.

Look, Ana, I appreciate your time today. Again, on behalf of SnapLogic and everyone at the company, you're a great customer. I appreciate you're also not just a great customer, but you gave us your time to talk on this podcast, and I appreciate that personally. And it's great to have you on the show.

Ana Yakovleff:

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dayle. It's been really fun.

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate you listening in. Hopefully, you've got some insight as to what a company like POWDR is doing. We've learned a little bit more about how they think about integrating all the technologies. Amazing they use SnapLogic, but again, I think what Ana's been able to do is talk us through how they think about new development, moving from legacy systems, where they're actually focused as much on the customer experience as they are their own internal areas. I think you're going to see a lot more better experiences. So go to their resorts and spend more of their money, which means Ana will have more money to do more technology work.

Ana Yakovleff:

Definitely.

Dayle Hall:

Thanks, everyone. That's the end of our episode. We'll see you on the next one.