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 dive into Snowflake’s record-breaking Q2 performance and explore how CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy is positioning the company for long-term AI-driven success.
Highlights
00:14 — Snowflake has been a remarkable story of growth and achievement—category creation here around the AI Data Cloud—and it reported last week a very strong Q2 with product revenue up 32% to $1.09 billion. That’s the first time it has topped $1 billion. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the competition is really intensifying.
01:16 — CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said, “We’re also trying to continue to push out new AI solutions and technology as rapidly as possible.” There are startups and similarly sized companies, such as Databricks and Palantir, coming after it in that core market. But also bigger players (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and others) are getting more deeply into this AI Data Cloud space.
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02:06 — Ramaswamy feels that Snowflake is very well positioned around this end-to-end data lifecycle spot that it has. He has been repeating relentlessly over the 18 months he’s been CEO that businesses cannot have a successful AI strategy unless they first have a successful data strategy and are able to execute on that data very, very forcefully and consistently.
03:30 — I mentioned Palantir last week and the phenomenal Q1 it had. It grew 48%. So I really applaud Snowflake for 32% growth. But here’s Palantir in a similar space—analytics and AI—growing 48%, which is a 50% higher growth rate than what Snowflake just posted. Databricks is growing very rapidly as well, doing some good things.
03:54 — Lots of competition there, but—as always in the Cloud Wars—the biggest winners are always, always the customers. Later, we’ll have a long, detailed article on Cloud Wars about Snowflake’s Q2 results, perspectives from Ramaswamy, and some of my own thoughts about how this all shapes out.
