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 analyze how Snowflake’s leadership under Sridhar Ramaswamy is reshaping the AI Data Cloud with rapid innovation and partner ecosystem expansion.
Highlights
00:25 — On Snowflake’s fiscal Q1 earnings call a couple of weeks ago, toward the end of May, it announced that its RPO — remaining performance obligation — was up 34%. And then this past week, at its Snowflake Summit event in San Francisco, they rolled out a very ambitious and broad product blitz covering multiple areas that feed directly into their new strategy.
01:08 — RPO was up 34% to $6.7 billion. And its Q1 product revenue was up 26% to $998 million, right at the billion-dollar threshold. Also, Snowflake, for the fiscal year, which will end January 31, raised their guidance to 25% growth to $4.32 billion.
02:17 — At Snowflake Summit this week in San Francisco, CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy spoke about how we’re moving into not just point solutions for data management, but in fact, Snowflake is now going to tackle the entire data lifecycle. He calls this “from ingestion to insights.” For some of the new products there, the big areas were about governance, security, and agentic AI integration.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
03:47 — It was 15 months ago when Ramaswamy took over as CEO at Snowflake from legendary CEO Frank Slootman. One of the first things he did was recognize the great foundation that Slootman had built, but he said, we are going to have to dramatically increase our pace of innovation, our pace of new product rollouts.
04:16 — Prior to his arrival, Snowflake billed itself as the Data Cloud. As soon as Ramaswamy arrived, he said, we’re now the AI Data Cloud. So everything that Snowflake is doing now is tied up into those two categories: data and AI. The third thing now was expanding the company’s scope, saying, now we’re going to handle the entire data lifecycle.
04:46 — The fourth piece is showing a great sense of openness toward partners. Everybody’s got data clouds now in the Cloud Wars Top 10, and Ramaswamy said, we’re going to have to be deliberate about how we think about, where we’re open and partner with other data clouds, and where we compete aggressively to ensure that customers get the latest and best innovation.
