The transition towards the cloud has been profoundly accelerated during the pandemic, as more and more companies became aware of the importance of managing infrastructure in a safe and reliable way. There’s no surprise that even the most traditional companies understand and take action to align to the trend, therefore creating the need for more advanced tools to maximise the value that the cloud can deliver.
Snowflake is one of the biggest players in the cloud market, providing an end-to-end platform for agile management and analytics of complex cloud data, covering multiple data workloads, ranging from warehousing to data exchanges. Additionally, Snowflake provides a suite of tools adapted to specific processes in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, and more.
We had a brief chat with Ross Perez, about Snowflake’s early days, its future plans and an ingredient of the secret sauce behind the company’s success.
Snowflake is the first analytic database built for the cloud. Can you tell us more about the history of the company, considering its innovative breakthrough?
Snowflake was founded in 2012 in the USA, California by 3 data warehousing experts: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski. Dageville and Cruanes previously worked as architects for the database product line at Oracle Corporation, Zukowski was a co-founder of the Dutch start-up Vectorwise.
Snowflake came out of stealth mode in October 2014 and became generally available in June 2015. Consequently, the platform became recognized as a “Cool Vendor” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and won first place at the 2015 Strata + Hadoop World startup competition. Snowflake was listed as no. 2 on Forbes magazine’s Cloud 100 list in 2019 and was ranked no. 1 on LinkedIn’s 2019 U.S. list of Top Startups.
As of Feb 9th, 2020, Snowflake has 4000 active customers, including Capital One, Sainsbury’s and Uniper. In September 2020, Snowflake was ranked #1 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list 2020, a list that recognizes the best private cloud companies in the world, just before the company officially became publicly listed on the NYSE.
Throughout these years, Snowflake as an ANSI-SQL build-for-the-cloud platform (customers can choose from AWS, Azure, GCP), has evolved from a data warehouse to a comprehensive data platform which covers such use-cases as data warehousing and data lake but also data applications, data sharing, data engineering, and data science.
What about your future plans?
We are confident that the Snowflake cloud data platform as a best of breed product will gain more and more popularity. Our development team is constantly working on the Snowflake platform to reveal new features and use-cases. Our vision is to enable the data cloud; where companies can connect and combine all of their data across many regions and organizations and run any workload they need to on top of it. We see this as a natural extension of the infrastructure clouds from AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as the application clouds like Salesforce and ServiceNow. With all of the data now sitting in these clouds, there is a clear opportunity to bring it together to make it more useful. You’ll see us continually developing our product and company to make this even easier to achieve.
Better data, faster solutions. What are the main industries where Snowflake has made prodigious changes?
Snowflake isn’t limited by any specific industries. Wherever there is the importance of agile and complex data analysis, there is a perfect match for the Snowflake cloud data platform. We are successfully exchanging on-premise legacy data systems, but also supporting already-cloud-based customers within their journey to Snowflake. We recently exceeded the number of 4000 happy customers who benefit from all the features that Snowflake brings to the table, together with the expanding ecosystem of technology partners and integrators.
One customer story that we love to talk about is Capital One. They have famously been one of the first companies to commit fully to the cloud, and Snowflake has been a key part of their enterprise transformation. By enabling them to combine all of their data in the cloud, and run massive numbers of workloads on top of it including business intelligence and data science, they have truly been able to transform the impact of data within their organization. Capital One has also been a key partner to us as we have built out the global infrastructure that makes Snowflake so powerful and delivers on the promise of the data cloud.
Snowflake is an official partner of Techsylvania: Beyond Borders. Learn more about them at https://www.snowflake.com/