On the heels of Q1’s 34% jump in RPO, Snowflake this week accelerated CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy’s ambitious innovation agenda by rolling out a slew of new products that strengthen its AI Data Cloud’s capabilities around agentic AI, integration, governance, and interoperability.
In a moment, I’ll outline some of the key product introductions made at this week’s Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, which the company said attracted 20,000. But first, I want to put those new capabilities in perspective by offering a snapshot of where Snowflake currently stands in the market even without the benefit of the just-launched new offerings.
Late last month, Snowflake reported the following for its fiscal Q1 ended April 30:
RPO was up 34% to $6.7 billion. (RPO is “remaining performance obligation” and represents contracted business not yet formally recognized as revenue — as such, it is an excellent proxy for the strength of a company’s pipeline of future business.)
Product revenue was up 26% to $998 million, and excluding the impact of 2024 being a leap year, that growth rate would have been 28%.
Net revenue retention was 124%, which reflects very strong renewal behavior among customers.
Snowflake raised its guidance for the full fiscal year to $4.3 billion on a projected growth rate of 25%.
On the Q1 earnings call, Ramaswamy aggressively positioned his company smack-dab in the middle of the two hottest trends in the business world today — AI and data — and declared that Snowflake helps customers do more with data while also accelerating innovation and companywide operations.
“At Snowflake, our mission is to empower every enterprise to achieve its full potential through data and AI,” Ramaswamy said on the call.
“Our AI data cloud helps customers get more value out of their data, innovate faster, and remove friction from their business operations. And as I have shared in the past few quarters, we are extending that value throughout the data life cycle.”
That last point is key — expanding the Snowflake product strategy to address the entire “data life cycle” — because it can liberate customers from having to find, interconnect, and manage dozens of point solutions for data management and analytics.
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Those are costly, time-consuming, and relatively low-value efforts for business customers and Snowflake is betting that its ambitious product rollouts at Snowflake Summit will convince many of those customers to drop the general-contractor gig and instead go with Snowflake’s fully integrated offerings that helps businesses optimize data “from injection to insight,” to use Ramaswamy’s phrase.
Let’s take a look at a few of those key announcements as described in the Snowflake press releases:
- Snowflake Intelligence and Data Science Agent Deliver The Next Frontier of Data Agents for Enterprise AI and ML – Snowflake announced new agentic AI innovations that bridge the gap between enterprise data and business action, making AI and ML workflows easy, connected, and trusted for technical and non-technical users.
- Snowflake Openflow Unlocks Full Data Interoperability, Accelerating Data Movement for AI Innovation – Snowflake unveiled Snowflake Openflow, a new multi-modal data ingestion service enabling seamless connectivity to ANY data source and architecture, helping customers eliminate data silos and accelerate AI deployment through pre-built connectors.
- Snowflake Introduces Cortex AISQL and SnowConvert AI: Analytics Rebuilt for the AI Era – Snowflake is removing the complex and high-cost barriers to harnessing AI by enabling users to analyze and act on all types of data and build flexible AI-powered pipelines — unlocking up to 60% cost savings with Cortex AISQL, and accelerating migrations off legacy systems through SnowConvert AI.
- Snowflake Marketplace Adds Agentic Products and AI-Ready Data from Leading News, Research, and Market Data Providers – New agentic offerings and upcoming Cortex Knowledge Extensions enable enterprises to enhance AI apps with proprietary content from partners while protecting data ownership and attribution.
Final Thought
In my conversations during Snowflake Summit with Snowflake executives and customers, the key themes that came up repeatedly were AI, agents, governance and security, open architectures, speed to value, ROI, integration (or, more precisely, avoiding the need for integration), and a preference for the type of consumption pricing model offered by Snowflake.
I also heard a fair amount about how now that many Cloud Wars Top 10 companies offer data clouds — a category pioneered by Snowflake — Ramaswamy and his team will have to strike the right balance between (a) openness and collaboration so that customers can have easy and secure access to all of their data, and (b) ongoing and intense competition that ultimately allows customers to choose the best solutions for their mission-critical needs.
And in the Cloud Wars, Snowflake will no doubt have plenty of competition in offering customers that “injection to insight” nirvana, which means that once again, the biggest winners in this new front in the Cloud Wars will be the customers.
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