If you ever needed more confirmation than customer and industry analyst validation of Snowflake’s technology disruption and leadership in data warehousing, look no further than the growing number of marketing attacks on Snowflake. Innovation in the high-tech space moves in waves and Snowflake is leading the way with the cloud data warehousing wave.
The more intense the targeting, the more validation that data warehouse architects and directors are evaluating Snowflake’s innovative, cloud-built data warehouse service as a solution to their data challenges.
Challenging the status quo
Snowflake was started on the belief that long-time data warehouse and Hadoop big data architectures were complex to manage, expensive to own, and prone to data silo sprawl. We placed a high priority, along with intense focus, on making the job of users, our customers, dramatically easier. The results were our Multi-Cluster Shared Data Architecture, an all new data warehouse, and a ANSI SQL relational database management system built for the cloud. At the time of our formal launch, there had been no new relational database management system developed in years.
How well has it worked?
In just three years, Snowflake has progressed to the leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics. Our customer reference scores were tops. Snowflake also progressed to become a leader in Forrester’s Big Data Analytics Wave.
Along with industry analysts, long-time vendors in these evaluations are also taking notice of Snowflake’s leadership and aggressive adoption by customers. As these vendors take notice, you should take notice too.
We respect the accomplishments of decades-old legacy companies. However, customers can only benefit from the cloud and modern data warehouse operations with real changes to legacy architectures and pricing. Complex physical infrastructure, manual scaling, and expensive up front licenses simply don’t provide the agility that is expected in the cloud.
Need proof? Watch this detailed video from a recognized retailer explaining the data struggles with traditional data warehousing approaches and how Snowflake’s cloud-built, multi-cluster shared data architecture helped.
The trend is your friend
Need other data points? Many of the long-time players are publicly traded companies. Examine their revenue growth over the last ten years. You’ll find growth has flattened or declined over a long period of time along with their pace of new customer acquisition.
By comparison, in just a few short years Snowflake has grown from a few hundred to over 2,000 active, new customers. As we announced recently our revenue, customer base, and organization have all tripled in size in the last year alone.
Claims that don’t match customer momentum
In spite of many legacy vendor claims, customers of all sizes and shapes continue to vote with their feet – and their budgets – by adopting Snowflake.
Are you being led to believe Snowflake is for small data marts? Don’t be fooled. In nearly all instances of Snowflake installed side-by-side with a legacy EDW installation, Snowflake surpassed the EDW’s data storage capacity, concurrent user connections, and compute capacity. We have large enterprises routinely executing over half-million queries a day, supporting thousands upon thousands of users, with tables storing multi-petabytes of raw structured and semistructured data such as JSON – all with a single implementation of Snowflake. In fact, because Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture is a solution to eliminate data silos, we are experiencing customers consolidating multiple very large legacy EDWs into Snowflake.
Seeing collateral that claims Snowflake requires specialized DBA expertise, provides no isolation of operational users from customer application data, and doesn’t deliver true elasticity? Listen to Snowflake customers such as Office Depot, Akia Bank, Capital One, Rent the Runway, and Hover. Each customer will give you a vastly different point of view.
Getting a wildly one-sided, multi-year TCO estimate? Ask for per second pricing, as well as for performance and pricing by workload. Our customers do not typically operate individual Snowflake virtual warehouses 24×7 and appreciate the flexibility to easily align workloads to actual usage and to the performance needs of their business. Beware of biased cost profiles that attempt to match Snowflake to a legacy vendor’s pricing lock-in and that mask the fact that their legacy system is unable to isolate workloads, at least not without a lot of complexity.
Best if you test for yourself
Highly and instantly scalable, cloud-built data warehousing as a service is a new concept to many individuals. We recommend you simply sign up and try Snowflake for free and assess the business value we bring to your organization. There is no up-front license or subscription cost for Snowflake. We are confident you’ll find cloud data warehouse deployment, management, workload isolation, security, and resource control does not get any easier.
Holding a ticket to Snowflake’s inaugural and sold out Summit user conference? Want to know how Snowflake compares to other architectures? Add this session, Getting Started With Snowflake – The Architecture (part of the Operating Snowflake Track), to your agenda builder or visit the Snowflake Hub to see a demonstration by our technical experts. #LetitSnow19
As we continue to engineer data warehousing for the cloud and focus on our customers, you can expect to gather quite a collection of marketing slicks that target us. That’s your sign Snowflake is the cloud-built data warehousing leader. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you to break through data barriers imposed by legacy solutions!