Technology research and analysis firm Gigaom has ranked Snowflake as the #1 cloud data warehouse in a recent study. We surpassed enterprise data warehouse products including, Google BigQuery, Teradata, IBM dashDB, HPE Vertica, Microsoft Azure SQL, SAP HANA and Oracle Exadata. Snowflake emerged with a top score of 4.85 out of a possible 5.0. The competition averaged a score of 3.5. The six “disruption vectors” Gigaom used as its key scoring criteria are congruent with what we wanted to achieve back in the summer of 2012, when we started Snowflake.

But long before we wrote the first line of Snowflake code, we asked one another: “What should a data warehouse deliver that no other product has before? How can we enable organizations to make the best, data-driven decisions? And how will the world’s most powerful data warehouse help organizations achieve their existing goals and help reveal their future goals?” We then set out to answer those questions.

We wanted to enable organizations to easily and affordably store all of their data in one location, and make that data accessible to all concurrent users without degrading performance. We also wanted Snowflake to scale infinitely, with ease, and cost effectively so organizations would only pay for the compute and storage they used. And the product had to work with the tools that users already knew and loved. Finally, we wanted a data warehouse that required zero management by our customers – nothing to tweak, no tuning required. These defining qualities aligned with the new world of cloud services, and they are what formed the foundation of Snowflake.

What’s happened since the early days of Snowflake? We got to work, and we stuck to hiring the best engineers the world has to offer. We built Snowflake from the ground up, for the cloud, and incorporated all of these elements as the core of the product. In early 2015, we offered the first commercial version of Snowflake – the one and only data warehouse built for the cloud. Since then, our engineering team has added more and more industry-leading capabilities to Snowflake, leapfrogging the traditional data warehouse vendors.

Along the way, we’ve hired high-calibre teams to execute the sales, marketing and finance functions of the company so our customers and partners get the highest value from working with Snowflake. We also built a great customer support organization, providing the level of service our users love. In more recent times, we’ve expanded operations outside of North America to Europe, with Asia-Pacific and other regions coming online soon. We’ve also added Snowflake On Demand™ – the easiest way to get started with Snowflake by simply signing up on our website with just a credit card. All of these efforts over the past four years have led to Snowflake’s most recent inflection point – being chosen as the number one cloud data warehouse.

What does all this mean? Snowflake’s current and future customers have every opportunity to explore all of their data in ways they never thought possible. They can gain the insight, solve the problems and create the opportunities they simply couldn’t with their previous data platforms. We committed to building the world’s best data warehouse – the only data warehouse built for the cloud. Our customers, our partners and now the industry have indicated we’ve likely achieved what we set out to do back in the summer of 2012. Going forward, we’ll continue to serve our customers and partners with the best technology, the best solutions and the best services available.

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