TECHNOLOGY
Snowflake opens UK office amid strong momentum across EMEA
Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, is opening a new UK office and Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in London, providing the ultimate workplace experience to employees and an area for collaboration with prospective clients.
This coincides with the company’s impressive growth following a successful fiscal 2023, which saw the company continue to shift the EMEA sales team to a vertical-focused model, drive wider customer adoption and consumption in the region, deliver developments and innovations related to data and application collaboration, and increase availability of its developer offerings with the GA of Snowpark.
Alison Tierney, SVP EMEA, Snowflake, said: “In FY23, we were laser-focused on shifting and cementing our position as a fully-fledged vertical company. This enables us to have deeper conversations with customers where each function from sales to marketing is driving the value of our tailored industry Data Cloud offerings to meet the opportunities and requirements associated with industries from financial services to retail.
“In the year ahead, we will focus on a few core areas for our EMEA customers, such as Snowpark, Customer 360 and ESG. These will empower our customers to develop new applications, help them understand the end-to-end journey of their own customers, and harness data to drive sustainability.”
In FY23, Snowflake’s product revenue in EMEA grew 72% YoY. The company also expanded its team in EMEA by 68%, reaching 1,289 in total as of January 31, 2023. In the UK specifically, Snowflake announced its availability on Microsoft Azure, a key milestone driven by high customer demand for local data residency both in the private and public sector.
Julien Alteirac, area VP UK&I and Benelux, Snowflake, said: “We are seeing growth across all verticals, and as the number of customers increases, the attraction and value of the Data Cloud for our prospects has followed.
“The opening of our new office is testament to our growth in EMEA and demonstrates our long-term goals in expanding our activity in the UK market, and supporting Snowflake’s sustained and continued growth in the coming years. As the second CEC to launch in the EMEA region the space will act as a strategic tool to build strong relationships, customer intimacy and trust. It is also a great opportunity to collect valuable insights from them to innovate and further develop our products and solutions.”
The new UK office will occupy 3,434 square metres in the heart of the city, near Liverpool Street, and is doubling in size capacity-wise. Sustainability is also at the heart of the new office. The building is cladded with a terracotta facade that has a low carbon emissions rating, and ensures the cooling and heating systems within the building remain in balance and highly efficient. The building also maximises heating efficiency by utilising a shared energy centre. Furthermore, all third-party vendors, such as hospitality and cleaning staff use entirely ecological and free pesticide products.
EMEA Corporate Momentum
Snowflake finished fiscal 2023 with impressive consumption. Key EMEA milestones from FY23, include:
- Product revenue for the twelve months ended January 31, 2023 grew 72% YoY to $268.2m, and global product revenue for the twelve months ended January 31, 2023 was $1,938.8m.
- Worldwide net revenue retention rate was 158%.
- 1,289 EMEA employees with over 5,880 employees worldwide (as of January 31, 2023), a marked increase from the prior year, which had 766 EMEA employees and nearly 4,000 global employees as of January 31, 2022.
- Snowflake expanded its availability in EMEA to the France (Paris) region on AWS, and availability in the United Kingdom (London) region on Microsoft Azure. With these expansions, Snowflake now supports 37 global regions across three cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, and Azure).
Global Corporate Momentum
Snowflake’s corporate momentum in FY23 was driven by the launch of the industry-specific Data Clouds, employee growth and several acquisitions, all enabling organisations to mobilise the world’s data.
- Telecom Data Cloud– Telecommunications service providers can leverage the Snowflake Telecom Data Cloud to break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, enabling organisations to easily and securely access data in near real-time, enrich it with machine learning (ML) models, and then share and analyse it to drive better decisions.
- Manufacturing Data Cloud – With Snowflake’s Manufacturing Data Cloud, organisations can build a data foundation for their business, improve supply chain performance, and power smart manufacturing initiatives in today’s digital-industrial world.
- Snowflake completed a number of acquisitions to help customers maximise value from their data, including:
- Streamlit, a data applications framework, in combination with Snowflake’s Data Cloud enables developers and data scientists to build and share data apps and to do so quickly and iteratively, without the need to be an expert in front-end development;
- Applica, an AI platform for document understanding, helps Snowflake’s customers more easily leverage unstructured data in the Snowflake Data Cloud;
- Myst, a company specialising in time series forecasting, helps Snowflake customers to make more accurate forecasts to guide management, facilitate planning and goal setting, and help mitigate risk;
- SnowConvert, a Mobilize.Net suite of tools, is significantly reducing migration effort and improving the speed of customer data migrations to Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
- During fiscal 2023, approximately 1,900 net new employees joined Snowflake, and Snowflake plans to continue hiring in fiscal 2024, in product, engineering, and sales.
Product Innovation
Snowflake has been laser-focused in updating and developing new innovations to its platform in FY23:
- Snowflake released new platform innovations, including two new workloads:
- Unistore provides a modern approach to working with transactional and analytical data together in a single platform. Unistore streamlines and simplifies the development of transactional applications, while providing consistent governance, strong performance, and near-unlimited scale to customers.
- Cybersecurity provides a unified, secure, and scalable data platform for helping security teams eliminate blind spots and respond to threats at cloud-scale.
- Data programmability enhancements: Snowpark for Python (GA), and a native integration with Streamlit (PrPr), 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. 20% of customers have now tried Snowpark.
Customer Growth
Snowflake in EMEA has doubled-down on industry specific customers and digital native companies who are mobilising their data in Snowflake’s Data Cloud:
- The number of EMEA customers grew to 1,678, representing a 34% YoY growth, with worldwide customers totalling 7,828 (31% YoY growth).
- 100% of Snowflake customers surveyed in the Dresner Advisory Survey 2023, said they would recommend Snowflake to other organisations for the 6th year in a row.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.
Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:
Next-generation chips
This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.
The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.
As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.
Zero-ETL integrations
AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.
The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.
Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.
Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).
Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.
The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.
Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.
“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”
Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.
“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”
Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.
MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.
Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says
In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.
With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.
Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.
“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“
MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.
Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
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