Snowflake Summit Recap

Snowflake Summit came to an end with nearly 9,000 in-person attendees and over 11,500 registered to watch virtually. Sigma Computing had a strong presence at the Summit, where we made a few new-to-the-world product announcements that further amplify the value of Snowflake to our customers. Let's take a look back at what the week consisted of and what some might have missed at one of the biggest data events of the year! This year’s Snowflake Summit was all about the world of data collaboration where we learned from hundreds of business experts along with  200+ partners coming together to share their data products and stories in an action-packed, exciting, and educational week.

Snowflake Announcements

Snowflake kicked off the Summit with some big announcements and new features. ​​We got a chance to hear from Snowflake CEO, Frank Slootman and Co-Founder Benoit Dageville, as they unveiled the next wave of technological firsts. In this keynote, we learned of Snowflake's seven new data innovation pillars, enabling companies to monetize their data and have access to it directly at their fingertips.

Unistore For Transactional and Analytical Data

Snowflake’s Unistore enables teams to build transactional business applications directly on the platform, run-realtime analytical queries on their transactional data, and get the benefits of governance, security, and scalability that come with snowflake's cloud data warehouse. This will allow both transactional and analytical data to be stored in the same location — enabling users to run queries on the data for quick results.

Snowpark For Python

This year Snowflake emphasized expanding workload types in a new way through Snowpark and Streamlit, as well as the ability to use Python so that native applications can be built in the data cloud. All of these new features would leverage the security and governance of the Snowflake ecosystem.

Snowflake is bringing native support for Python. The goal is to enable ML engineers and developers to leverage the entire Python ecosystem of tools. Along with this announcement, Snowflake recently acquired Streamlit which is an open-source Python-based web application framework. This framework will fill in gaps that often exist between data science teams and business teams. Streamlit empowers data teams to quickly and easily build interactive applications.

Native Application Framework

Snowflake introduced the native application framework which provides a new way to build applications directly in the Snowflake data cloud. Providers can build, distribute, and monetize their applications on the Snowflake marketplace where customers can install them. This data marketplace is a big step forward and allows customers to put data to work faster in a secure environment — making it easy for companies to look for products already within the Snowflake ecosystem and gives companies an opportunity to test data before making a purchase.

Throughout the event, we saw multiple Snowflake speakers have sessions on platform innovations, data cloud collaboration, and machine learning and application development. Attendees got a glimpse of what the future of the cloud data industry will look like with some powerful and exciting new features and improvements that will eventually improve the way we work with data and answer critical questions.

Sigma at Summit

Product Announcements

Sigma hosted two sessions announcing some exciting new product features. Our first session was hosted by our Sr. Director, Solutions Architecture Jon Avrach, and Sr. Solutions Engineer Sofie Garden, as they walked us through Sigma's Datasheets and Live Editing demo which can help business users effectively iterate on analysis without requiring any of the heavy lifting by the data engineering team.

In the second session, our CEO, Mike Palmer sat down with two of our customers Prologis and GoPuff as they shared their stories about how they are leveraging Sigma in their data stack to solve problems within their businesses and drive faster business outcomes. Palmer was also invited to sit down for an interview with theCUBE to discuss how Sigma is changing the analytics & BI industry and how customers are leveraging Sigma to get to the underlying data to solve difficult questions and make data-driven decisions in minutes.

Sigma is on a mission to bring self-service analytics at scale to all of our customers. We believe that every business user should be able to use data to drive faster and better decisions in their organization. Snowflake allows users to access all of their data in one secure and fully-governed place while Sigma enables users to explore, analyze, and drill through all of their data at near unlimited scale and speed to gain the insights they need to drive their business forward. For those organizations that are looking to get started with both Snowflake and Sigma, check out this quickstart guide.

Partnerships

At our booth, attendees got a chance to hear from some of Sigma’s strong system integration partners such as Data Clymer, Datateer, and phData, as well as technology partners such as Metaplane and [*] Select Star. The Snowflake team also made several appearances in the booth, with Partner Engineer Keith Smith providing an overview of visualizing Snowflake Clustering in Sigma, and Healthcare SME Patrick Kovalik speaking on how Snowflake and Sigma can solve some of the Healthcare Industry’s most common and challenging issues.

Looking Forward

Data accessibility and collaboration should go hand in hand. At Snowflake Summit we learned that everyone should be able to use data to solve business problems. In the future Snowflake wants to create a fully governed and secure data marketplace similar to the app store, where businesses can pick data applications that best fit their needs.

As a close and early partner of Snowflake, Sigma looks forward to deeper and richer integration with Snowflake, to serve our joint customers more effectively. We share Snowflake's belief in the power of collaboration and are excited to bring the power of the Data Cloud to business teams everywhere, so they can make better and faster decisions.

The future of the cloud data industry is exciting, data is becoming more accessible to everyday business users, enabling them to solve problems quickly and efficiently.