Live from Las Vegas. Cloud data warehouse provider Snowflake is reconnecting with events in physics. The last on-site edition dates back to 2019, before the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, the firm then proposed a virtual event to maintain the link with its ecosystem of customers and partners. Today, she is therefore doing things big for the occasion and Snowflake Summit 2022, which is being held from June 13 to 16, should bring together 10,000 people in Las Vegas. To open the ball, Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake since April 2019, returned to the growth of the firm. With 5,944 customers in its portfolio – including 506 of the 2021 companies in the Forbes Global 2000 – the provider is doing more than well.

The publisher announces a total revenue of 1.2 billion euros in 2022 against 592 million euros in 2021. Affecting increasingly varied sectors, the firm clearly shows its objective: to mobilize all the data in the world. In France, the company is very reassured about its future, considering itself “as a key supplier of the data economy”. Edouard Beaucourt, country manager France at Snowflake, specifies that the French entity has gone from 30 to a hundred employees in one year, a change which has been accompanied by a strong increase in the number of customers in areas such as telecoms, mass distribution, the luxury industry, logistics or even energy and manufacturing. Snowflake has also largely benefited from the needs that emerged during the pandemic in certain companies and the obligation to make rapid decisions. It thus addressed professions which until then had not been digitized and had an urgent need to move forward with their projects. Taking stock of Snowflake’s solutions portfolio, Edouard Beaucourt considers that the publisher uses up to 80% of the data life cycle and is aiming for 100% in the years to come.

A loaded roadmap

To present the latest solutions and features that will strengthen the Data Cloud ecosystem, Benoit Dageville, co-founder of Snowflake and president responsible for products, spoke. True to his habit of presenting a roadmap for the next two years, he unrolled the batch of Snowflake innovations aimed at powering Data Cloud. The enterprise data unification platform also provides the means to share data with other organizations globally. First, the ability to provide fast access to data, even at petabyte scale so that anyone can “run all [ses] workloads in Snowflake”. A breakthrough “made possible by our multi-cluster shared data architecture which completely decouples data storage from computing,” he explains. In fact, resources can be ramped up and down in seconds, where power is delivered instantly to every workstation.

He goes on to mention Snowgrid – a platform where everyone can share and collaborate easily without ETL – specifying that the latter can connect all regions and offers the possibility of migrating between different clouds. Benoit Dageville also discusses the programmable aspect of the Data Cloud. In this sense, Snowflake announces extending the native support of Python and launches Snowpark for Python, now available for all customers in public preview, with the aim of making “the ecosystem of open-source Python packages and libraries accessible to data scientists, data engineers and application developers” specifies the editor. The Snowpark development framework, introduced in June 2021 and available to everyone since the end of January, notably allows these businesses to create scalable machine learning applications and flows directly in Snowflake using their favorite languages ​​and libraries. Note that a native integration with Streamlit – acquired last March – for the rapid development and iteration of applications is under development.

Framework and workloads on the menu

Snowflake announces the launch of a Native Application Framework dedicated to the creation, monetization and deployment of applications in its datastore. Currently in private preview, this framework is aimed at developers who want to create applications and monetize them on the Snowflake Marketplace. “Users will be able to securely install and run these applications directly in their Snowflake instances, reducing the need to move data.” This framework will use features such as Streamlit integration for the development of interactive client interfaces and telemetry, event management and alerts for monitoring and troubleshooting are also under development. With this tool, the publisher wants “data cloud developers to be able to focus on the functionalities and not on the operational load”.

Also on the agenda, the launch of the Unistore and Cybersecurity services. Unistore offers a workload to unify transactional and analytical data in the datastore. As part of this workflow, Snowflake is introducing Hybrid Tables, which provide fast single-row operations and provide organizations with additional means to perform rapid analysis on transactional data. “In the same way that we have redefined data lakes and data warehouses for our customers, Unistore is ushering in a renaissance for building and deploying a new generation of applications in the data cloud,” said Christian Kleinerman, vice -Senior President of Snowflake Products. As for the Cybersecurity workload, it should offer cybersecurity teams more visibility and automation at cloud scale. “Customers are able to efficiently store years of big data, search with on-demand scalable computing resources, and obtain insights using universal languages ​​such as SQL and Python, currently in private preview,” says Snowflake. The Cybersecurity workload supports a broad spectrum of use cases, including security compliance, cloud security, identity and access, vulnerability management, and more.