DEA-C01 test - SnowPro Advanced Data Engineer Updated: 2024

04 Jan 2024

Laser light sheet and SLR camera scan the air to map lanes where snow is glistening.

As well as a better understanding of how snow cover gathers at ground level, the findings could lead to new data about snowflake fall speed, a parameter of interest for predicting weather patterns and assessing climate change.

"Even in the tropics, precipitation often starts its lifetime as snow," commented Timothy Garrett from Utah's Aerosol Cloud Climate Systems Group.

"How fast precipitation falls greatly affects storm lifetimes and trajectories and the extent of cloud cover that may amplify or diminish climate change. Just small tweaks in model representations of snowflake fall speed can have important impacts on both storm forecasting and how fast climate can be expected to warm for a given level of elevated greenhouse gas concentrations."

The research, published in Physics of Fluids, employed a novel experimental set-up designed to obtain both the vertical velocity and acceleration statistics of individual snowflakes settling in atmospheric surface-layer turbulence, parameters which have previously proven challenging to measure.

In 2021 the Utah group developed the differential emissivity imaging disdrometer (DEID), an instrument designed to measure the mass, size and density of falling snowflakes, or "hydrometeors." This device observes a flake falling onto a heated metal plate with an infrared camera, imaging the flake's spatial dimensions before it melts and then calculating its mass via the loss of heat from the hotplate.

The DEID is now commercialised by a Utah spin-out, Particle Flux Analytics, which also markets the multi-angle snowflake camera (MASC) taking 10 to 30 micron resolution photographs of hydrometeors from three angles; and SnowPixel, a thermodynamic sensor array designed to assess snowflake precipitation as part of meteorological sensor networks.

Particle tracking finds simplicity within complex patterns

The new study built on the previous use of DEID by positioning the instrument directly beneath a particle tracking system. This used a laser light sheet and a single-lens reflex camera to follow the path of flakes as they crossed the light sheet on their way down.

To test the system the project spent the winter of 2021-22 at Alta, the snowiest place in Utah, where nature delivered 900 inches of snow for it to study.

Despite the intricate shapes of snowflakes and the uneven air movements they encounter, the researchers found they could predict how snowflakes would accelerate based on the Stokes number, a flow parameter reflecting how quickly the particles respond to changes in the surrounding air movements.

The same mathematical pattern was also involved in how different snowflake shapes fall at different rates, suggesting a fundamental connection between the way the air moves and how snowflakes change as they descend from the clouds to the ground.

“Snowflakes are complicated and turbulence is irregular, so the simplicity of the problem is actually quite mysterious," said Garrett.

"There is something deeper going on in the atmosphere that leads to mathematical simplicity rather than the extraordinary complexity we would expect from looking at complicated snowflake structures swirling chaotically in turbulent air. We just have to look at it the right way, and our new instruments enable us to see that."

University of Utah video

As you’ve probably noticed, gut health is all the rage among health bloggers and reporters. Punch “improve gut health” into Google and you’ll get dozens of articles and blog posts with titles like “Improve Your Gut Health in 7 Easy Steps” and “15 Things You Should Eat for a Healthy Gut.” Unfortunately, while the science behind gut health is real, it’s unlikely that any of these tips and tricks and recommended foods will do anything for you, because just like snowflakes, no two microbiomes are exactly alike. So if you want a diet that promotes gut health, it has to be a diet designed specifically for your gut. And the only way to get that is with a cutting-edge gut health test like this advanced gut microbiome test from Viome.

The human microbiome is the complex ecosystem of microorganisms that live in and on the human body. Over the last 15 years, scientists have discovered that this ecosystem plays a huge role in our overall health. And of particular importance is the gut microbiome, which is the community of symbiotic bacteria and other microorganisms that live in your digestive tract.

When your gut microbiome is out of balance, your body doesn’t absorb nutrients the way it should. This results in inflammation, which scientists now realize is the root of almost every chronic disease. latest research has shown that gut microbiome can affect almost every system in the body. Some studies even link gut health to specific diseases and conditions, including diabetes, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, and colon cancer.

Unfortunately, as with many other health trends, most of the genuine science pertaining to the gut microbiome has been lost in a sea of so-called probiotics and gut health products that are only designed to cash in on our desire to be healthy. In reality, if you want to take advantage of the latest advances human microbiomics to lose weight and Improve your overall health, you need a microbiome test to figure out exactly what is going on in your digestive tract. And that brings us to Viome's advanced gut health test.

A microbiome test is sort of like a DNA test. Instead of mapping out genes that are linked to specific health issues, think of it as a gut health test that maps out the microorganisms in your gut microbiome . And Viome's Gut Intelligent Test is the most advanced microbiome test in the world. It uses advanced metatranscriptomic sequencing technology developed at the Los Alomos National Laboratory to identify and quantify the microorganisms in your gut. Then it analyzes what nutrients and toxins these organisms are producing in order to provide you with personalized nutrition recommendations.

Once you place your order, Viome will send you an easy to use at-home kit to collect your sample. After you return the kit by mail, Viome analyzes it with its proprietary microbe identification technology. They then use an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to create customized dietary recommendations.

These recommendations are designed to increase microbial species associated with overall wellness; minimize microbial species associated with poor health; create the ideal ratio of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats for your diet; and encourage foods that are most compatible with your metabolism. And all recommendations come with detailed explanations and are delivered straight to your mobile device via the intuitive Viome app.

So if you’re ready to get serious about gut health, don’t waste your time or money on gimmicky supplements and beverages. Trust science and get your microbiome tested with a gut health test from Viome.

Futurism fans: To create this content, a non-editorial team worked with an affiliate partner. We may collect a small commission on items purchased through this page. This post does not necessarily reflect the views or the endorsement of the Futurism.com editorial staff.

Snowflake — a mobilizer of enterprise data through a company’s data cloud — exceeded investor expectations in its most latest financial report, according to MarketWatch.

While Snowflake’s shares closed December 5 at $186 a share — 52% below their November 2021 high — the company’s November 29 third quarter report seems to have boosted its stock price by 8%.

Will Snowflake continue to beat expectations? Based on my latest interviews with company executives, a Goldman Sachs analyst, and a Snowflake customer — Freddie Mac’s chief data officer — the data platform provider has several factors working in its favor, including:

• More spending on Snowflake’s services.
• High return on customer investment.
• Building new services to satisfy new customer needs.

Snowflake faces several risks — including competition from hyperscalers like AWS and others, the possible failure of its compliance procedures, and slower than expected migration to the cloud, according to Morningstar.

However, the company appears to be riding a cresting wave of demand and is well-positioned to capture a significant share.

Snowflake’s Third Quarter 2023 Performance and Prospects

Snowflake stock rose 7.6% after the company reported expectations-beating results on November 29.

Here are the key numbers from MarketWatch:

• Q3 product revenue: $698 million, up 34% and $19 million above analyst estimates.
• Q3 Adjusted earnings per share: 25 cents — up 127% and nine cents per share above estimates.
• Q3 net revenue retention rate: 135%.
• Q3 customers with over $1 million in revenue: 436.
• Q4 revenue guidance: a range between $716 million and $721 million — the midpoint of which is about $22.5 million more than estimates.

“These results reflect strong execution in a broadly stabilizing macro environment,” CEO Frank Slootman said in a release.

Snowflake enjoyed increased demand in the third quarter. In a December 4 interview, Slootman told me, “We grew revenue 34% in the latest quarter. The big takeaway to read into it is the markets have stabilized.”

He added that in “Q4 22, Q1 23, and Q2 23 we saw disruption as people focused on rationalization and getting rid of stuff. We reset guidance based on our consumption model. The financial world does not love the consumption model on the way down. In Q3 we maintained our guidance. We see continued strength and raised our Q4 guidance.”

More Spending On Snowflake’s Services

Due to Snowflake’s consumption model — where customers pay for what they use, rather than a fixed per person monthly fee — the company’s revenues fluctuate with demand.

Despite push back from investors, Snowflake sees the consumption model as the wave of the future. “The consumption model is positive for the entire sector,” Slootman said.

“I was previously CEO of ServiceNow NOW which has a traditional subscription model,” he added. “I thought the model was unfair to customers to charge them on a per user per month basis whether they used it or not.”

Investors like the predictability of the traditional SaaS model but customers have mixed feelings about it. As he told me, “The consumption model is great for customers on the way down — since they do not pay for what they do not use. However, on the way up, they pay more to use more and they don’t like it.”

Earlier in 2023, customers were consuming less. Now they are increasing their spending. “We came out of a period of irrational exuberance during the pandemic. There was over caffeinated spending,” he said. “The bill came due and companies rationalized and optimized in reaction to the prior several years.”

By diversifying its customer base, Snowflake is less likely to experience such future fluctuations. “Over the last four or five years, our business was mostly digital natives,” Slootman told me.

He added, “Since then we have layered in traditional companies — such as banks, manufacturers, health care, and retailers. We are more stable now. It won’t happen again.”

High Return On Customer Investment

Snowflake customers say they get value from the company’s products. I have previously written about how Goldman Sachs and State Street STT have benefited. In a nutshell, they value getting faster access to the data they need to make better decisions.

Freddie Mac is getting faster answers with Snowflake. On December 5, Aravind Jagannathan, vice president chief data officer at the company, told me, “In 2019 we wanted to move our data from on-premises to the cloud. We wanted to be quicker in providing insights from the data while reducing the risk of having multiple copies of our data moving back and forth.”

Freddie Mac picked Snowflake for its faster speed to market and better query performance. “A report that used to take until 3 pm to deliver arrived at 8 am,” Jagannathan said. He added, “Processing that used to take 12 hours is now done in 35 minutes. A capital report that used to take many hours can be done in 10 minutes.”

Freddie Mac will take its time on using Generative AI. “We are being thoughtful about regulators and senior management,” he said. “Snowflake can support Generative AI. We are going to make sure we have the right data governance and have identified the right use cases.”

New Services To Satisfy New Customer Needs

The world changes fast and companies can only keep growing if they position themselves to take advantage of those changes in ways that benefit customers.

Snowflake’s technology has evolved in the direction of greater flexibility for customers. “We used to offer data warehousing for a very specific use case of making batch processing data available for analytics,” Slootman said.

He continued, “We have added many different kinds of workloads. Now we have a platform based on all kinds of live data. Now the work is going to the data. It is easy to inquire about what is happening now in the business. We are working towards enabling users to ask ‘What will happen next quarter? Why? Will it happen again? What should we do about it?’”

Generative AI will contribute to realizing Slootman’s vision for a forward-looking decision support system. According to my December 4 interview with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake’s senior vice president of AI, “Fidelity uses Snowflake as its platform of record for all data. If they want a global picture it can be done easily with live data through Snowflake.” (Ramaswamy previously led Neeva, a search service powered by AI without advertisements, that Snowflake acquired in May 2023).

To that end, it sounds to me as though Snowflake is cautiously building a way for end-users to make natural language queries of their data. “2023 is the year of AI,” Ramaswamy said. “First we have the ability to synthesize information in a fluid conversation through ChatGPT using Neeva.”

Snowflake is developing this vision in stages. First, search can be done through frequently asked questions. Next, the company is offering CoPilot to make it easier for people to write SQL code to provide faster access to the data. “We are building out the capability to query data in real time,” he concluded.

Like Freddie Mac, Snowflake is not going to offer Generative AI until it is safe. “We are building business applications and we want it to be rock solid with no hallucinations,” Slootman said.

He added, “AI is bridging the gap between man and machine. We are working on the last mile. We will not launch until security and governance are solid and we provide links to know where the data came from. We will have auditability and verifiability.”

Where Will Snowflake Stock Go?

If Generative AI works safely and effectively, more people will use Snowflake to access corporate data — which would increase the company’s revenue and presumably its stock price.

How much revenue will this add? “It is not there yet to quantify. It is bigger than a breadbox. It will become massive. It will pay for itself — for example in contact centers. It can run multiple workloads at the same time. A client told me, ‘People are getting drunk on Snowflake,’ ” Slootman concluded.

Goldman Sachs is bullish on Snowflake. According to my November 30 interview with Goldman Sachs managing director, Kash Rangan, “Snowflake is like a Ferrari — it is bigger, faster, and has more power. These days we are talking about analyzing so much more data — exabytes. Creating an architecture that runs in the cloud is essential for providing accurate analysis at scale.”

Snowflake creates significant business value for customers. “Snowflake can help you compare three suppliers and identify which one delivers on time and at the lowest price,” he told me.

Rangan added, “An investment bank can run daily analysis to find out which customer is the most profitable, which equity and fixed income trades made the most money. It is really hard to get those answers fast. If you have to wait a week, the information is not actionable.”

Goldman sees Generative AI as an opportunity for Snowflake in two areas: data and training large language models. Snowflake enables non technical users to ask a question in plain English to get access to all that data.

For example, Rangan said, “You can ask: ‘My supply chain is gnarled up. How can I configure it so I can deliver what customers ordered in three days rather than seven?’ ” He added, “Snowflake uses SQL. So before LLMs, only experts in SQL coding could tap into that valuable business data. Now anyone can access it.”

He thinks Snowflake has a bright future. “It has core technology, a great business model, an outstanding management team, and the ability to execute.”

Another analyst has a more mixed outlook. According to Morningstar — which set a price target of $231 for Snowflake — the analyst was disappointed with the company’s profitability; while its Q3 revenue and revenue forecast were better than anticipated.

Ultimately, Morningstar views Snowflake as well positioned to take advantage of the growth resulting from AI. However, the analyst is anticipating the investment required to satisfy the demand will cut into Snowflake’s profitability.

As long as Snowflake keeps reporting better than expected revenue growth, its stock price should rise.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a data lake, warehousing, and sharing company that came public in 2020. To date, the company has over 3,000 customers, including nearly 30% of the Fortune 500 as its customers. Snowflake’s data lake stores unstructured and semistructured data that can then be used in analytics to create insights stored in its data warehouse. Snowflake’s data sharing capability allows enterprises to easily buy and ingest data almost instantaneously compared with a traditionally months-long process. Overall, the company is known for the fact that all of its data solutions that can be hosted on various public clouds.

Snowflake Ranked #1 on 2023 Fortune Future 50 List

Annual Fortune list recognizes Snowflake as the leading company with the capability to deliver sustained long-term growth in the era of generative AI

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the Data Cloud company, today announced that it was awarded the number one spot on the 2023 Fortune Future 50 list. The annual list from Fortune recognizes leading publicly traded companies based on a market-based assessment of a company’s growth potential, and its capacity to deliver against that potential. Among the focuses of this year’s list includes companies driving the future with generative AI.

Snowflake has transformed the data industry with Snowflake Data Cloud, a global network that connects organizations to the data and applications most critical to their business. The Data Cloud enables a wide range of possibilities, from creating a real-time data backplane for the modern enterprise, collaborating over content with partners and customers, integrating external data and applications for fresh insights, to simplifying the complexity of generative AI - all from Snowflake’s single, cross-cloud platform. This accolade from Fortune is a testament to the incredible opportunity ahead as Snowflake empowers customers across industries to more easily mobilize data and AI for business value.

“In this new AI era, generative AI and large language models will reshape how we live, work and do business. But there is no AI strategy without a data strategy,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, SVP of AI at Snowflake. “We are honored to be named at the top of Fortune’s Future 50 list and look forward to continuing to help customers solve their biggest problems and deliver real value using AI.”

To identify the Future 50, the BCG Henderson Institute examined more than 1,000 publicly traded companies with at least $20 billion in market value or $10 billion in revenue in the 12 months through the end of 2022. Thirty percent of a company’s score is based on market potential—defined as its expected future growth as determined by financial markets. The remaining 70% is based on a company’s capacity to deliver against this potential, which comprises 19 factors, selected for their ability to predict growth over the following five years, which fall into four categories: strategy, technology and investments, people, and structure.

Learn More

• Join Snowflake’s annual developer conference, BUILD, December 5-6. Register for the virtual event here.
• Read how Snowflake Cortex is providing customers with fast, easy, and secure LLM-powered app development in this blog post.
• Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Snowflake

Snowflake enables every organization to mobilize their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, power data applications, and execute diverse AI/ML and analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies. Thousands of customers across many industries, including 647 of the 2023 Forbes Global 2000 (G2K) as of October 31, 2023, use Snowflake Data Cloud to power their businesses. Learn more at snowflake.com.

Media Contact
Danica Stanczak
Global Corporate Communications Lead, Snowflake
press@snowflake.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231205878318/en/

What snowflakes tell us about our Universe

PROF BRIAN COX: Snowflakes are intricate, beautiful, mysterious, and totally captivating. But for all their complexity - and endless variety - the structure of a snowflake can be explained by a few universal laws of nature. Laws that explain everything from snowflakes to galaxies. Let’s start at the beginning. What is a snowflake? Or, to use its more technical name, a snow crystal? A snow crystal forms up in the clouds when water vapour meets little specks of dust or pollen. This forms its tiny hexagonal heart. The tips stick out and are rough. This attracts water molecules. And then more water molecules. And more. These form the branches of our snowflake. The size and shape of these branches depends on the exact temperature and humidity that the snowflake meets on its journey through the clouds, pulled down by the force of gravity. Each one takes a very slightly different route - meaning no two snowflakes are quite the same. When a snowflake lands on your sleeve, it has been on its own, totally unique, journey to reach you. Before melting away in a moment. Way back in 1611, on a bitterly cold January morning in Prague, a snowflake landed on the sleeve of mathematician Johannes Kepler. And it got him thinking: “Why do snowflakes have six sides?” Kepler’s breakthrough was his theory that this hexagonal pattern is the most efficient use of space. Whether it’s a honeycomb within a beehive. Or piles of stacked cannonballs. Or a delicate, transient, snowflake. It took 400 years - 400 years - for his theory to be proven. What Kepler didn’t know at the time is that each molecule of water, or H2O, is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. As the water molecules cluster together when they freeze, the angle between the hydrogen atoms is always, approximately, 105 degrees. And that gives us the six sides. At its heart, a snowflake is always a hexagon. But it can grow into all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes. Long and thin, like a pencil. Sharp like a needle. Cylindrical like a bullet. Or, just occasionally, triangular. The truth is though, most snowflakes are kind of… well, blob-like. If you speak to a snowflake photographer - there are just a handful in the world - they’ll tell you it takes days and days out in the cold to get that “money shot”. And the conditions have to be just right – between minus 15 and minus 13 degrees. But ever since Wilson Bentley, a farmer from the US state of Vermont, painstakingly took the first photos of stunning snowflakes in 1885, we’ve been hooked. Scientists have shown that symmetry is incredibly pleasing to the human brain. Snowflakes are all radially symmetrical, which means you can cut them into identical slices, like a cake. Shells, flowers, starfish, even spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, share this type of symmetry. And nature has one last trick up its sleeve. Snowflakes aren’t actually white. They’re clear, but they have lots of edges, and this scatters the light, making them appear white. Each snowflake is a microcosm of the laws of physics. Gravity makes it fall. Electromagnetism dictates its shape. And you’ve got symmetry. It’s the same with the stars, and solar systems, and planets. And with us. When you look at a snowflake, you can read its history. Its own unique story. The experiences it encounters shape it into what it is. Just like us, really.

‘In the old days, I think we used to sit and fester on it and sort of ‘poor Snowflake,’ and it was sort of the David and Goliath story,’ says Colleen Kapase, Snowflake’s senior vice president of worldwide partner and alliances. ‘We’ve reached across the trenches, (and) we’ve created those relationships.’

Amazon Web Services’ relationship with data cloud provider Snowflake has followed a dynamic arc that’s seen the two companies evolve from competitors to frenemies to more strategic allies serving joint customers amid a spirit of coopetition.

The success of that partnership is illustrated by their joint co-selling goals that have more than doubled year over year since 2020, according to both companies.

“We continue to blow our metrics out of the water,” Sabina Joseph, AWS’ general manager of technology partners, told CRN.

The seven-year relationship hasn’t always been a cakewalk for AWS, Snowflake or their joint partners. Snowflake started as an AWS customer and competitor. While today it also runs on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, Snowflake was born on AWS and a “substantial majority” of its business operates on AWS’ public cloud infrastructure, according to regulatory filings. In mid-2020, prior to its $3.36 billion initial public offering, Snowflake disclosed it had committed to spending $1.2 billion through July 2025 on AWS cloud infrastructure services. As a competitor, meanwhile, Snowflake competes directly against Amazon Redshift, AWS’ data warehouse service that launched in 2013.

Deloitte Consulting had been a longstanding global systems integrator (GSI) partner with AWS before becoming a partner with Snowflake in early 2020.

“It’s always tricky when you’ve got an established, very strategic relationship and then a new player comes in,” said Frank Farrall, the cloud analytics and AI ecosystems leader at Deloitte who also heads its Snowflake alliance. “We knew…they already sit on top of AWS in the majority of situations, however, they compete with one of AWS products, so there is this coopetition-type thing that we’re really going to have to navigate. We were actually really worried. We took a…kind of risk mitigation orientation…early in the relationship, and there have been times of tension between AWS and Snowflake that we have had to navigate a little bit and try to read the tea leaves around how that’s playing out.”

Back in 2015, AWS and Snowflake’s relationship was overwhelmingly competitive.

“The two sales teams in the field would do just that: They would compete,” said Colleen Kapase, Snowflake’s senior vice president of worldwide partner and alliances. “If Snowflake did win, sort of we were tolerated. That’s completely evolved and changed over time, and I do credit AWS’ customer-first mentality for helping to make this space for that change.”

AWS and Snowflake had about 30 joint customer deals prior to 2019. Their relationship began to shift when they started building out a joint strategy together and focused on joint customer use cases, particularly around migrating large on-premises customers and their data-oriented workloads onto AWS using Snowflake, according to Joseph.

“We started to realize this is not about perceived coopetition that exists, this is really about providing differentiated, best-of-a-kind solutions for our mutual customers,” Joseph said.

Snowflake deeply invested in technical integrations with AWS that were core to a successful go-to-market partnership, Joseph said, including integrations with AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, and AWS PrivateLink, which allows customers to privately access AWS services without using public IPs.

“Those product integrations were key,” Kapase said. “PrivateLink was key to Snowflake selling into the enterprise segment — that was required for a lot of our enterprise customers.”

Snowflake now has more than 20 horizontal product integrations with AWS – the most among its cloud provider partners. Snowflake was a featured partner for AWS AI for data analytics (AIDA) solutions unveiled at AWS re:Invent 2021 last November. It has deepened its integrations with Amazon SageMaker, AWS’ flagship machine learning (ML) service, and was the only partner included in last November’s launch of SageMaker Canvas, a visual, no-code, ML capability that allows business analysts to generate predictions without ML expertise.

The Evolution Of The Relationship

While AWS and Snowflake’s partnership started on the product side, it progressed to sales compensation and then to specific use cases in vertical industries. Beyond the breadth and depth of its AWS integrations, Snowflake has become one of AWS’ largest partners in terms of its go-to-market engagement and number of joint customers — from healthcare company Anthem to global shipping and mailing company Pitney Bowes to financial services provider Western Union.

AWS and Snowflake signed a strategic collaboration agreement in mid-2020, with both companies increasing their investments in partner sales, marketing and alliance teams globally.

“We also have an annual partner plan from a technical and business perspective, which guides us to the set of initiatives…that we’re going to do in a (geographic region), how are we going to work with SIs, GSIs, what kind of industry vertical use cases we want to focus on, and then also what kind of goals — genuine hard goals — that we jointly want to achieve,” Joseph said.

In December 2020, AWS unveiled an incentive program called AWS ISV Accelerate that compensates its sales teams for selling independent software vendor partners’ SaaS solutions — such as the Snowflake Data Cloud — that are integrated with AWS. That helped align AWS’ and Snowflakes’ sales teams.

“The change in sales comp went from we were tolerated, to all of a sudden the sales team on the AWS side was saying, ‘OK, I see this unique use case for Snowflake,’” Kapase said. “We started seeing that the co-sell between the two companies — the joint registrations of our field bringing AWS in, AWS bringing us in — just ignited. Sabina and I had to sit down in Q4 and say, ‘We’re going to blow out our co-sell goal together. We have to up our goal for next year,’ because it was like wildfire. It wasn’t just in the U.S. We made some bets in Europe and in Asia as well, and we still had a 2X increase there in terms of customer engagements and customer wins.”

AWS and Snowflake last year also began focusing their partnership on industry verticals such as media and advertising and financial services, and doubling down on working with GSIs and other ISV partners.

The two companies have gone through the “curve of true competitors, to frenemies to truly being an alliance,” Kapase said.

“We have a similar DNA between us and AWS,” she said. “Snowflake is 100 percent consumption-driven. That’s the only numbers we report out to the street. A lot of that customer-first mentality is not just about buying the products, it’s about using the products. And what we saw as we’ve been working together is that consumption move faster…and we have happier customers jointly across each other.”

That’s not to say everything has run smoothly.

“Like with any field organization, there are always challenges,” Kapase said. “In the old days, I think we used to sit and fester on it and sort of ‘poor Snowflake,’ and it was sort of the David and Goliath story. We’ve reached across the trenches, (and) we’ve created those relationships. Myself and quite a few of the executives now at Snowflake have the bat phone directly into Sabina, to Carol Potts, who runs the (AWS) ISV sales team. We had to bring those issues out, and what we saw was a really fast execution to resolve those field issues. You’d like to say it’s more complicated than that, but the reality is old-fashioned communication and sharing information and working through issues helps strengthen the relationship.”

It comes down to transparency, according to Joseph.

“I’m a firm believer that in any partnership, you’ve got to be transparent and say it the way it is and state the facts, and then that would bubble up to the right outcome for the end customer,” she said. “That’s how I believe that we have operated, especially the last two to three years, which has enabled us to really deepen this partnership.”

How AWS And Snowflake Partners View The Relationship

AWS and Snowflake are both “best of breed” and better together, said Hilary Feier, general manager for global data and analytics at Seattle consulting firm Slalom. AWS’ 2021 National System Integrator Partner of the Year and Snowflake’s four-time Partner of the Year, Slalom has implemented the AWS/Snowflake integration for its own internal data platform.

“They’re just a winning combination,” Feier said. “Snowflake brings a bit of that ‘easy button’ to cloud data platforms where you can T-shirt-size it. You can basically have people with SQL skills take what they brought with them. And AWS has this incredibly extensive, comprehensive, kind of ‘Legoland’ of incredible parts that you can really build whatever you want. That combination together works really, really well to service our clients.”

It’s been about 2.5 years since Slalom experienced occasional pressure to favor Amazon Redshift over Snowflake from AWS services teams incentivized to sell the cloud provider’s own product, according to Feier.

“We have some really direct and frankly good partnering conversations on…the strengths of the different platforms, and they were really open,” she said. “It was…very productive, because we have a really good relationship on both sides.”

AWS eventually realized that it benefitted significantly when Snowflake won on its platform, Deloitte’s Farrall said. If a client picks Snowflake and has AWS as the underlying hyper-scaler provider, AWS gets the consumption benefit of Snowflake and the data consumption that’s driven by the customer, he said.

“What we have seen over the last probably 18 months is almost like a radical reorientation of AWS’ thinking related to us and Snowflake,” Farrall said. “We now have senior account executives from AWS that will call us up and say, ‘Hey, we think that the right answer for this particular client that we’re all looking at…is Snowflake, AWS and Deloitte. Can we partner together? Can we work together on the architecture? Can we build a business case together for that client?’ At first, we were really quite stunned when we started to get this type of a reach-out.”

That outreach has become common, particularly in the six months to a year, according to Farrall, and Deloitte, AWS and Snowflake now have a joint go-to-market motion with a dozen prioritized customers where that architecture exists.

“We’re talking together about how do we best maximize the result for the customer,” Farrall said. “You hear the word ecosystem thrown out there quite a lot. What we’re seeing with the dynamic with AWS and Snowflake is a real ecosystem play, and we’re very positive, very excited about that.”