Snowflake celebrates its largest-ever user conference with launch of new innovations

Data Cloud company Snowflake has concluded its fourth-annual Snowflake Summit conference, with nearly 9,000 in-person attendees and more than 11,500 registered to watch the virtual event, live in Las Vegas, Nevada in June.

Snowflake Summit 2022 is Snowflake’s largest in-person conference to-date, bringing customers, partners, technical experts, and executives together to explore the power of the Data Cloud. The four-day conference featured four marquee keynote addresses, 275+ total sessions spanning 10 different session tracks, 200+ ecosystem partners, 100+ customer speakers, 28 hands-on labs, an abundance of SnowPro™ certifications achieved by conference goers, and more.

Snowflake chairman and CEO, Frank Slootman, and Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, kicked off the event with seven key innovation pillars that position Snowflake at the forefront of technology and data innovation. A key theme throughout was that Snowflake first massively transformed analytics, then collaboration, and now application development with the Data Cloud.

Snowflake SVP of products, Christian Kleinerman, then revealed during his keynote address expanded capabilities and product innovations that advance the Data Cloud:
● Unistore Workload: Snowflake’s transformative Unistore workload, currently in private preview, will unlock new transactional use cases, and deliver a modern approach to working with transactional and analytical data together in a single platform.
● Native Application Framework: Snowflake’s Native Application Framework, currently in private preview, empowers developers to quickly and easily build, monetise, and deploy data-intensive applications in the Data Cloud.
● Cybersecurity Workload: Snowflake’s new Cybersecurity workload provides a unified, secure, and scalable data platform for helping security teams eliminate blind spots and respond to threats at cloud-scale.
● Data Programmability Updates: Snowflake’s data programmability enhancements, including Snowpark for Python, currently in public preview, and a native integration with Streamlit, currently in development, make Python’s rich ecosystem of open-source packages and libraries accessible for data scientists, data engineers, and application developers to streamline development, and build and share interactive applications.
● Expanded Data Access: Snowflake’s new innovations increase data access with enhancements for working with streaming data through Snowpipe Streaming, currently in private preview, and Materialised Tables, currently in development, alongside making data stored in open formats and on-premises available in the Data Cloud with Iceberg Tables, currently in development, and External Tables for On-Premises Storage, currently in private preview.
● Snowflake Marketplace Advancements: Snowflake Marketplace now goes beyond just data, expanding to offer applications that run natively in the Data Cloud so customers can get value faster, improve security and governance, and access cutting-edge technologies for extended collaboration efforts, while providers can reach more customers and use built-in monetisation through Snowflake’s Marketplace.

More than 100 customer sessions from organisations like Capital One, Geico, Novartis, Warner Bros. Discovery, and more shared best practices and strategies for driving data-driven outcomes. Additionally, AT&T was named the 2022 Data Drivers Awards winner for North America, the premier data awards that honour Snowflake customers leading their organisations and reimagining what’s possible with the Data Cloud.

Snowflake’s expansive partner ecosystem shared 80+ announcements around Snowflake Summit. Additionally, Snowflake shared record growth in its Powered by Snowflake program, with 425 partners, and over 165 Snowflake Marketplace partners (as of April 30, 2022). Snowflake also launched a new Snowflake Partner Network (SPN) Competency program, enabling partners to further validate and differentiate their Snowflake vertical expertise to customers, the Snowflake field teams, and the overall Data Cloud ecosystem.

Snowflake Summit also recognised early-stage companies that are leveraging Snowflake to build innovative applications and products in the 2022 Snowflake Startup Challenge. Hundreds of organisations entered the Startup Challenge to compete for a chance to win up to $1 million in funding from Snowflake Ventures, with Snowflake CMO, Denise Persson and Dageville announcing the winners live on-stage on June 16. A panel of Sequoia Capital, Snowflake executives, and Snowflake board members selected Houseware as the ultimate winner. Snowflake Ventures also announced recent investments in Domino Data Lab, Immuta, and Matillion.

Snowflake further doubled down on its number one value ‘put customers first,’ by unveiling the latest findings from its 2022 Customer Experience Survey at Snowflake Summit. The annual survey, conducted June 2022 and produced in partnership with Walker, assessed over 6,000 Snowflake customers across more than 50 countries to provide Snowflake with a Net Promoter (NPS) Score. This year’s NPS Score of 72 is more than three times the industry average of 19, based on the Qualtrics 2021 NPS Industry Benchmarking Report, and demonstrates Snowflake’s continued commitment to customer-centricity.

Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, said: “Snowflake Summit 2022 was all about the ‘World of Data Collaboration,’ and the energy, announcements, and attendance at the event was incredible to witness.

“Every year Snowflake Summit raises the bar, and this year was no exception with data leaders from around the globe coming together to share, learn, collaborate, and explore new ways to drive businesses forward with the Data Cloud.”

Tags: Snowflake