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Today Christian Kleinerman (SVP Product, Snowflake) grouped his keynote announcements and discussions into three broad areas: core platform, data cloud content, and building on Snowflake.
There was certainly a bit of excitement in the air as it relates to partners at the keynote. Christian continued to emphasize partners, and he started off by repeating a thought from the other Data Cloud World Tours which is that Snowflake is one product. I think this message needs to remain in front of the partner mind: Snowflake will continue to encourage partners to invest in the single platform and will be unsupportive of any partner who wants to create a non-unified experience with Snowflake.
Snowflake Core Platform
Under the core platform pillar some of the big announcements centered on cross-cloud availability and replication which can make Snowflake a much safer platform to run your business on, especially at global scale. One big shout out for partners was the announcement around data listing analytics. If you are a data provider partner for Snowflake, this is a big win for you. Understanding how consumers are using your data listings will ensure you can make the best decisions as you look to add or remove data sets.
For the governance and security partners, these cross-cloud replication and failovers might cause some issues depending upon how your solution is implemented. For users of tokenization or external functions in general, we know there might still be some need for Snowflake to continue to invest in this area so governance and security features can also seamlessly failover.
Snowflake Data Cloud Content
The second pillar around data cloud content was focused on producing applications and workloads on Snowflake. Partners like EY, phData and Infosys were specifically called out. And it was clear these partners were in the crowd as there was some unexpected cheering! If you are not thinking about building an application natively inside of Snowflake this part of the talk would have you reconsidering. A new partner/ecosystem new startup called Samooha was brought on stage. In under 6 months, the company went from mockup to full working product to help build clean rooms within Snowflake. They noted it was still really new but showcases how quickly you can build an MVP and bring a value-added process to market directly in Snowflake.
Building on Snowflake
Snowpark for Python is now GA! This was the biggest announcement from the last segment around building on snowflake. They actually produced fake snow in the room to make it a true ‘snowday’! Partners can now have a secure single place in Snowflake to share data and run python models directly on data inside of snowflake. This is huge for partners. Christian noted a 6x uptick in usage since the initial announcement at Snowflake Summit ‘22.
Streamlit can be run directly in Snowflake, which will make building and selling an application inside of Snowflake much easier, was a big deal as well. This will make it much easier for users to consume these applications as data will no longer need to leave Snowflake.
It was great to see Sri Chintala on the stage. I remember two years ago when we were first looking at becoming a Snowflake partner, Sri was one of the first product folks we talked with. At the time she was leading the external function group which ALTR utilized heavily. Now she is working with python use cases and got the chance to demo her latest work on stage. It’s amazing to see the product folks mature and with that maturity continue to bring partners, like Anaconda who Sri mentioned on stage, along with them. She also did a good job handling those microphone issues!
All in all, it was another exciting Snowday, and ALTR is looking forward to the next six months as a Snowflake partner. I’ll be posting some thoughts on what I hear throughout the day on LinkedIn. Catch me there until next time!