
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.
Interested in more AI Insights? Take our AI Ecosystem course available on demand. Discover how AI has created a new ecosystem of partnerships with a fresh spirit of customer-centric cocreation and renewed focus on reimagining what is possible.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine recent insights shared by Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman.
Highlights
00:19 — A company that is definitely shaking things up is Snowflake. Recently, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said he sees the external environment stabilizing. The result of that: customer spending is rising.
00:57 —That was similar to the two other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies that reported their fiscal quarterly earnings, Workday and Salesforce. Collectively, the three companies’ CEOs indicated that business is picking up; customers are spending largely because they don’t want to get left behind in the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) revolution.
02:01 — Slootman said, “A lot of our revenue by percentage came from digital native, cloud-native companies. We’re still getting lots of those. But more and more…the big majority now, is from large enterprises.”
02:36 — It was interesting that Slootman has made the point on a couple of occasions about the power of unstructured data being unleashed at the dawn of the GenAI Revolution.
03:17 — Slootman said that Snowflake has been purposefully working on new technologies and services to allow customers to support unstructured data. The result in Q3: among its customers, consumption of unstructured data was up 17x, and 30% of Snowflake’s customers were processing unstructured data.
04:09 — Slootman is a primary advocate of saying, “There is no AI strategy unless you have a data strategy,” and many customers have been saying, “I want in on the AI thing.” And what they’re learning is first they’ve got to get their data strategy together.
04:57 —Thanks for being with us here at Cloud Wars, and I hope you have a fantastic 2024.