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>> Good morning, live from Las Vegas.
Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here
covering Snowflake Summit 22.
Dave, it's great to be here in person.
The Keynote we just came from was standing room only.
In fact, there was overflow.
People are excited to be back and to hear from the company
in person the first time, since the IPO.
>> Lots of stuff, lots of deep technical dives.
They took the high end of the pyramid
and then dove down deep in the keynotes.
It was good. >> They did.
And we've got Doug Henschen with us
to break this down in the next eight to 10 minutes.
VP and Principle Analyst at Constellation Research.
Doug, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Great to be here.
>> All right, so guys, I was telling Dave
as we were walking back from the Keynote,
this was probably the most technical Keynote
I've seen in a very long time, obviously in person.
Let's break down some of the key announcements.
What were some of the things Dave,
that stood out to you and what they announced
just in the last hour and a half alone?
>> Well, we had a leave before they did it,
but the Unit store piece was really interesting to me
cause the big criticism is, "Oh, say Snowflake
that don't do transaction data, it's just a data warehouse."
And now they're reaching out.
We're seeing the evolution of the ecosystem.
Slootman said it was by design.
It was one of the questions I had for them.
Does this just kind of happen or is it by design?
So, that's one of many things that we can unpack.
I mean the security workload, the Apache tables
we were just talking about that Doug,
which not a lot of hands went up when they said,
"Who uses Apache tables?
But, a lot of the things they're doing seem to me anyway,
to be trying to counteract the narrative,
that I mean, that data bricks is put out there
about you guys aren't open.
You're a walled garden and now they're saying,
"Hey, we're as open as anybody."
But what are your thoughts, Doug?
>> Well, that's the iceberg announcement,
also the announcement of Uni store
being able to reach out to any source.
I think the big theme here,
was this contrast you constantly see with Snowflake
between their effort to democratize and simplify,
and disrupt the market by bringing in a great big tent.
And you saw that great big tent here today, 7, 000 people.
7, 000 plus I'm told, 2, 000 just three years ago.
So this company is growing hugely quickly
>> Unprecedented.
>> Yeah, fastest company to a billion in revenue
as Frank Slootman said in his Keynote today.
And I think that there's that great big tent.
And then there's the innovations they're delivering.
And a lot of their announcements are way ahead
of the general availability.
A lot of the things they talked about today,
Python support and some other aspects,
they're just getting into public preview.
And many of the things that they're announcing today
are in private preview.
So it could be six, 12 months
before they're generally available.
So they're here educating a lot of these customers.
What is iceberg?
They're letting them know about,
"Hey, we're not just the data warehouse.
We're not just letting you migrate your old workloads
into the cloud, we're helping you innovate
with things like the data marketplace."
I see the data marketplace is really crucial
to a lot of the announcements they're making today.
Particularly the native Apps.
>> What was interesting, Slootman in his Keynote said,
"We don't use the term data mesh,
cause that has meaning to the people."
And I think lady from GEICO stood up and said,
"We're building a data mesh."
And when you think about, the those Zhamak Dehghani's
definition of data mesh,
Snowflake's actually ticking a lot of boxes.
I mean is it a decentralized architecture?
You could argue that it's their own wall garden,
but things like data as product,
we heard about building data products,
self-serve infrastructure, computational governance,
automated governance, so those are all principles
of Zhamak's data mesh.
So, they are as close as anybody that I've seen
with the exception of, it's all in the data cloud.
>> Why do you think he was very particular
in saying, "We're not going to call it a data mesh?"
>> I'll think he's respecting the principles
that have been put forth by the data mesh community
generally and specifically, Zhamak Dehghani.
And they don't want to data mesh wash.
I mean, I think that's a good call.
>> Yeah, it's a little bit out there.
And they didn't talk about data mesh so much as GEICO,
the Keynote mentioned they are building one.
So again, they have this mix of the great big tent
of customers and then very forward looking,
very sophisticated customers.
And that's who they're speaking to,
with some of these announcements, like the native Apps,
and the uni store to bring transactional data,
bring more data in and innovate, create new Apps.
And the key to the Apps is that they're made available
through the marketplace.
Things like data sharing, that's pretty simple.
A lot of their competitors are talking about,
"Hey, we can data share."
But they don't have the things that make it easy.
Like the way to distribute the data,
the way to monetize the data.
So now they're looking forward to monetizing Apps.
They changed the name from the Data marketplace,
to the the Snowflake marketplace.
So it'll be Apps, it will be data,
it'll be all sorts of innovative products.
>> We talked about GEICO,
JPMC is speaking at this conference,
and the lead technical person of their data mesh initiative.
So it's like, some of their customers
that they're putting forth.
So it's interesting.
And then Doug, something else that you and I
have talked about on some of the panels that we've done is,
you've got an application development stack,
you got the database over there,
and then you have the data analytics stack.
And I've said, will those things come together?
Then people have said, "Yeah, they have to."
And this is what Snowflake seems to be driving towards.
>> Well with Uni store, they're reaching out
and trying to bring transactional data in.
Hey, don't limit this to analytical information.
And there's other ways to do that, like CDC and streaming,
but they're very closely tying that again
to that marketplace, with the idea
of bring your data over here and you can monetize it.
Don't just leave it in that transactional database.
So another reach to a broader play
across a big community that they're building.
>> It's different than what we saw last week at Mongo,
different than what Oracle does with heat wave.
A lot of ways to skin a cat.
>> That was to be my next question to both of you is,
talk to me about all the announcements that we saw,
and like we said, we didn't actually get to see
the entire Keynote.
I had come back here.
Where are they from a differentiation perspective in terms
of the competitive market?
You mentioned Doug, a lot of the announcements
in either private preview
or soon to be public preview early.
Talk to me about your thoughts
where they are from a competitive standpoint.
>> Again, it's that dichotomy
between they are very forward looking announcements.
They're just coming on with things like Python support,
that's just becoming generally available.
They're just introducing machine learning algorithms,
like time series built into the database.
So in some ways they're catching up
while painting this vision of future capabilities,
and talking about things that are in development
or in private preview, that won't be here for a year or two,
but so they're out there talking about a bleeding edge story
yet the reality is the product sometimes are lagging behind.
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean a lot of companies choose not to announce anything
until it's ready to ship.
>> Yeah.
Typically that's a technique used by the big whales
to try to freeze the market.
But I think it's different here and the strategy
is to educate customers on what's possible,
because snowflake really does have...
They're trying to differentiate from, "
Hey, we're not just a data warehouse.
We have a highly differentiable strategy
from whether it's Oracle or certainly,
Mongo is more transactional, but whether it's couch base
or Redis or all the other databases out there,
they're saying, "We're not a database, we're a data cloud."
All right? >> Lisa Martin: Right.
>> Okay, what is that?
Well, look at all the things that you can do
with the data cloud, but to me the most interesting is,
you can actually build data products
and you can monetize that.
The emphasis on ecosystem, if they look at Slootman's
previous company, with ServiceNow,
it took a long time for them to build an ecosystem.
It was a lot of SIs in smaller SIs
and it finally took off,
but this is exceeding my expectations
and ecosystem is critical because they can't do it all.
Otherwise they're going to spread themselves too thin.
>> That's what I think some competitors
just don't get about Snowflake.
They don't get that it's all about the community,
about their network that they're building
and that relationships between these customers
and that they're facilitating that with distribution,
with monetization, things that are hard.
So you can't just add sharing, or you can share data
from one of their legacy competitors
in somebody else's marketplace
that doesn't facilitate the transaction,
that doesn't build on the community.
>> Well, and one of the criticisms too,
the criticism on Snowflake is they can't do complex joints.
They don't do workload management.
And I think their answer to that is,
"Well, we're going to look to the ecosystem to do that.
Or you saw some kind of cost governance today
in the in the Keynote, we're going to help you
optimize your spend."
A little different than workload management, but related.
>> A part of their governance was having a node
for every workload.
So workload isolation in that way,
but that led to the cost problems.
Like too many nodes with not enough optimization.
So here too, you saw a lot of announcements
around cost controls, budgets, new features, user groups
that you could bring caps and guardrails around those costs.
>> In the last couple minutes guys,
talk about their momentum.
Frank Slootman showed a slide today
that showed over 5,900 customers.
I was looking at some stats in the last couple of days
that showed that there is an over 1200% increase
in the number of customers with a million plus ARR.
Talk about their momentum, what you expect to see here.
A lot of people here, people are ready
to hear what they're doing in person.
>> Well, I think the stats say it all.
Fastest company to a billion in revenue.
You see the landing, expand experience
that many companies have.
And in the cost control announcements they were making,
they showed the typical curve
and he talked about it being a roller coaster
and we want to help you level that out.
So that's a matter of maturation.
That's one of the downsides of this rapid growth.
You have customers adding new users,
adding new clusters, multi clusters,
and the costs get out of control.
They want to help customers even that out
with reporting, with these budget and cost control measures.
So, one of the growing pains
that comes with adding so many customers so quickly
and those customers adding so many users
and new workloads quickly.
>> I know we got a break, but last point
I'll make about the Keynote is, Slootman alluded to the fact
that they're not taking the foot off the gas.
They don't see any reason to, despite the narrative
in the press, they have inherent profitability.
If they want to be more profitable, they could be
but they're going for growth.
>> Going for growth.
There is so much to unpack in the next three days.
You won't want to miss it.
TheCube's wall to wall coverage.
Lisa Martin, for Dave Vellante.
Doug Henschen joined us in our Keynote analysis.
Thanks so much for watching.
Stick around, our first guest is up in just a few minutes.
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