Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Snowflake?

Snowflake is processing data on a vast scale. Every day, more than 500 million queries are executed across its Data Cloud platform, totalling over 250 petabytes of data. Managing this immense workload is a team of more than 2,000 employees operating worldwide.

So what else is behind this software heavyweight? TechDay spoke with Peter O'Connor, Snowflake's Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific, to discuss the company's offerings, its recent product launches, and its growing presence in Australia and New Zealand.

"Snowflake is all about the Data Cloud," O'Connor said. "It's built from scratch and uses Snowflake's multi-clustered shared data architecture, made up of six key components."

O'Connor explained that these begin with data engineering, which covers the preparation, transfer, and ingestion of information. Next is the data lake, which enables organisations to store all their data - whether it is from IoT devices, weblogs, sensor feeds, or more traditional sources such as CRM or ERP systems - in a single, low-cost location. "This removes silos of data across the organisation, which is often difficult to query," he said.

The remaining components include a data warehouse for analytical workloads, a data science layer for machine learning and AI analytics, the data applications function enabling customers to build using connected tools like Tableau or Salesforce, and, crucially, data sharing.

"Data sharing really is the enabler for the Data Cloud," he said. "It allows clients to share data in real time and very securely with other stakeholders, potentially suppliers or customers. They can also access data in the public data marketplace which Snowflake has, and blend it with their own data for deeper and greater insights."

O'Connor stressed that Snowflake is "cloud agnostic," operating across all three major public cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The aim is flexibility and ease of access regardless of a client's chosen ecosystem.

Summing up the platform's advantages, O'Connor said: "There are a lot of benefits and value differentiation. Some of the main ones would be removing significant operational overhead, enabling you to analyse your data at volume, and supporting all types of data - both semi-structured and structured. There's instant elasticity so you can scale up and down as you need it. If you have a spike in users at the end of the month or quarter, you can scale up instantly and scale straight back down again."

A key feature is the pay-as-you-consume utility service model. "No more paying for reserve 24x7 infrastructure that might be sitting idle for periods of time," he said.

Turning to recent headlines, O'Connor was keen to highlight the firm's latest announcement at a global summit attended by over 50,000 people. "We announced a new offering called Snowpark. Snowpark allows developers and data engineers and data scientists to write Snowflake code in their preferred way - in Scala or Java, and later on in Python as well - and execute it directly in Snowflake. This will be available from the first quarter of next year," he explained.

Another noteworthy development was integration with Salesforce, which now enables Salesforce users to query data residing in Snowflake "a lot easier and a lot faster."

Closer to home, Snowflake's Australia and New Zealand operations are expanding rapidly. "Snowflake today runs on both AWS and Azure in Australia, which obviously covers the Australia and New Zealand market," O'Connor said. The company has offices in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Perth, with a Canberra office slated to open in early 2023.

"We have about, geez, it's growing so quickly, about 45 to 50 employees in Australia and New Zealand," O'Connor continued. Staff roles encompass sales, sales engineering, marketing, channel management, professional services, and training.

For organisations interested in the technology, O'Connor noted that contact is straightforward. "Well, they can contact us through our website, and by the way, you can access a free trial of Snowflake on our website. That enables you to use Snowflake and get used to the service at your leisure."

For partners, Snowflake has a thriving local ecosystem. "We have a whole host of different types of partners in Australia already. We have application partners that are building applications on Snowflake. We have data providers who are adding their data into Snowflake marketplaces. We've got global and local systems integrators and a wide range of technical alliance partners, such as visualisation tools, ETL tools, and data engineering tools," he said.

O'Connor encouraged anyone considering collaboration to make contact. "If people are keen to partner with Snowflake, we have a partner portal called the Snowflake Partner Portal. You can just log on there and we'll get in contact with you as soon as possible."

He finished on a note of optimism for the company's local evolution: "Yeah, that's probably the best way, I guess," he said.