Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, in his first Snowflake Data Cloud Summit as CEO, introduced himself to the large audience in his opening keynote, and discussed where he sees the company moving as it goes forward.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy
SAN FRANCISCO – Snowflake, whose data cloud has seen strong growth throughout multiple components over the last several years, kicked off their Data Cloud Summit 24 event this week, with their relatively fresh CEO discussing where he sees the company going forward, what customers can expect to see and what is very unlikely to change.
“You are the epicentre of all things data and AI,” CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy told his keynote audience. “The snowflake data cloud has exploded over the last 10 years because of what you are all building, serving five billion inquiries every single day. That’s almost the scale of the number of Google searches that happen daily on the planet. That’s 200 trillion rows in our largest customer data. Something like Snowpark, which enables us to bring the power of Snowflake to Python users, is taking off. 50% of our customers are now using Snowpark.”
Ramswamy laid out his agenda, something that he thinks is particularly important, because while he is not new to Snowflake, he is new to the CEO role.
“I’ve been here three months, even though it sometimes feels like two years in a good fun kind of way, and for the last year, I led Snowflake’s AI strategy and innovation,” Ramaswamy said. “There is no company in the world more focused with combining technology and customer utility than Snowflake.”
Ramaswamy then emphasized what is not going to change under his leadership.
“We have been committed to putting customers first, and ensuring that our NPS scores go through the roof,” he stated. “This reflects our commitment to hard work and building a single unified platform. We don’t make you do the hard work of integration. At the core of the data platform is data, and we have expanded the layers of data that Snowflake can operate on. In addition, to complement the data foundation.n we have delivered Cortex AI our fully managed data service, and then put Gen AI into the hands of every Snowflake user.”
Ramaswamy did not announce the rollout of a multitude of new Snowflake services, which would be made public on the next day, but he did announce one.
“The AI Data cloud is lighting up every corner of the enterprise, and as the AI cloud has expanded its scope and capabilities, many of you, especially at large enterprises, have been asking for better ways to centralize access for all your data, not just the data that’s stored in Snowflake,” he said. “You want a simple and efficient way to apply the right engine for the right job. That’s why I am so thrilled to announce Polaris Catalogue, an open catalogue for Apache Iceberg, and I am delighted to make this commitment to deliver interoperability with Google Cloud, AWS, Azure and many other industry leaders. We will be open sourcing this is in the next 90 days.”
Finally, he announced what would be changing going forward.
“We will be accelerating our product delivery,” Ramaswamy stated. “While you like to see new things, we also know that you want them in General Availability as fast as possible. You can expect rapid fire delivery from us going forward.”
