Snowflake bigs up the power of the partner and eyes deeper engagement to tackle business challenges in the enterprise AI era

Snowflake used its most recent World Tour event in London to thank partners for the role they have played – and continue to play – in its success. 

The company is a pre-teen, having turned 12 back in July and has achieved a great deal so far, but it has its eyes firmly set on future gains as well as being humbled by the fact it simply couldn’t do what it does without the partner ecosystem. 

“I am thrilled to be here in London. This year marks a special milestone for us. Snowflake just celebrated its 12th birthday. We wouldn’t be here without you, our amazing customers and partners,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake’s CEO. 

“The AI data cloud is big and it’s growing rapidly. We are proud to serve over 10k customers with an amazing number of partners who are all here.”

Jimmy Hall, Snowflake’s vice president and country manager of UK and Ireland, took to the stage prior to Ramaswamy but his sentiment regarding the importance of partners was no different. 

More than 2,500 attendees across at least 1,500 organizations were in attendance at the Excel on Thursday last week, according to Hall, who said: “It is very humbling to see so many of you here today, You are certainly in the right place to [find out] all about how Snowflake is mobilizing the world’s data by building the greatest AI data and applications platform. 

“Today we have a very exciting agenda for you all. We are welcoming you into the era of enterprise AI. There are more than 2,500 attendees from over 1,500 organizations present here today.” 

Hall continued: “You’ll be hearing first how many Snowflake customers and partners are strengthening their data foundation with Snowflake’s platform, harnessing the power of Generative AI that’s easy, trusted, and efficient, gaining insights from the data and applications. And you will learn why there is no AI strategy without a data strategy.”

Hall was the first to present on stage to kick off the one-day event, but his comments were likely to resonate for some time to come with the assembled delegates. 

“My final comment, as always, is to our partners,” he said.  

“A massive thank you to you all. You’ll see many Snowflake partners on stage and around the expo. Our partners are an integral part of our success and I urge you to spend time with them understanding how they can help you on your data and AI journey. So without further ado let’s bring the era of enterprise AI  here to London…“

As of July this year, Snowflake had more than 10,000 partners globally, with at least 2,000 of these being based in EMEA.  Back then,  Dan Waters, Snowflake’s vice president of partner and alliances in EMEA, was keen to stress it was absolutely more about quality than quantity when it came to growing the firm’s partner base. That focus on who to partner with seems to be paying dividends based on customer success if the recent keynote featuring a range of customer testimonials is anything to go by. 

Indeed, Natwest took to the stage with Ramaswamy to talk about how the financial institution is benefiting from working together. 

“The real reason we brought Snowflake in five years ago and my previous shop before that is it makes our engineers and analysts great. It works for them and they love it. We have over 40 domains now using Snowflake,” said Zachery Anderson, chief data and analytics officer at Natwest. 

“We have users using it and more and more domains onboarding every day before it works.”

Anderson added: “[We have] really good access controls that go up and down the stack at a very granular level. [We also have] data quality that is transparent and investigatable,  Only Snowflake has that built-in lineage and data quality. 

“Those two things, in particular, means you have to have your data foundations right, or any of those hundreds of use cases that you roll out end up being really small and don’t have a lot of replicability, To get scale [of]  AI implementations, you have to have those [two things].”

Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product at Snowflake also took to the stage at the keynote to highlight both the capabilities of the platform and its partners. 

“Our goal is that you all walk away inspired and excited about Snowflake and what the technology can do for you, or your organization, or your business,” he said. 

There are close to 2.500 in the Snowflake external marketplace as of now, which shows how many use cases are available for both partners and customers alike. 

“We have an amazing ecosystem of partners that help you get data from all sorts of initial sources and make it available to Snowflake,” Kleinerman said. 

Kleinerman talked up the benefits of the Snowpark environment of libraries and code execution when compared to Spark, saying when it came to pipelines Snowpark was 4.6 times faster and offered up to 35% cost savings. 

He also said that more than half of Snowflake customers use Snowpark on a weekly basis. 

“If any of you have not given Snowpark a try, maybe one action from today would be to go and try it,” he said. 

“Take one pipeline and tell me how it goes. There’s a big chance you will be able to say to your organization ‘I have done it faster and cheaper for us.’”