Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I’m covering Snowflake’s strong Q3 performance, driven by a 68% growth in its AWS partnership, totaling $3.9 billion.
Highlights
00:20 — Snowflake announced a blowout fiscal Q3. The most interesting angle was the booming partnership between Snowflake and AWS, where Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said that the partnership has booked, in the last 12 months, $3.9 billion in business, up 68% over the previous 12 months. Other big numbers: overall product revenue is up 29% for the quarter to $900 million.
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01:05 — Now, this one really jumped out: Its RPO (remaining performance obligation) was up 55% to $5.7 billion. The AWS partnership was a big kicker there. They had several $50 million deals in the quarter. And also, as a result of this, Snowflake’s market cap surged about 30%. It is now about $72 billion.
02:02 — CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy took over in February and he was handpicked by former CEO Frank Slootman to be the next CEO of Snowflake. Now, we saw a huge drop in the market cap of Snowflake after Slootman left. But now, steady performance over the last few quarters, led by Ramaswamy.
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02:44 — I think he turned the corner, not only with the financial performance and market momentum, but he’s also got the company cranking out more new products faster than ever before. And now, Ramaswamy has the whole company centered on two things: their primary product or service. It was the Data Cloud. Now it’s the AI Data Cloud. And overall, it’s positioning itself as the enterprise data platform.
03:43 — Great to see this renewed strength from Snowflake. I admire the company because it is so much smaller than the other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies, and it is in such a hot field that it really created around the Data Cloud. Now, so many more are coming into it.
04:32 — Ramaswamy said that, in addition to what they’re doing with AWS, “We’ve got some nice growing business with Microsoft Azure,” and he even said, with Google Cloud, “We have some shoots of green grass growing up here and there.” So, an interesting time for Snowflake.
