Former Microsoft Corp. executive Bob Muglia is standing down from his role as chief executive at Snowflake Computing Inc. after five years in the job.

Muglia (pictured), who helped the cloud data warehouse startup achieve strong growth and attract enormous funding during his tenure, will be replaced by Frank Slootman, who did a similarly good job as CEO and chairman of ServiceNow Inc.

Slootman ran the show at ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017 during a massive growth phase that saw it transform itself from an information technology service automation platform to one that’s focused on a much broader array of business processes. Previous to that, Slootman also led Data Domain Inc. through its initial public offering before it was eventually acquired by EMC Corp.

Muglia said he will hang around at Snowflake for the time being in order to assist with the transition.

“Bob is a high integrity leader and leaves us with an excellent reputation,” Snowflake’s board of directors said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Bob through this transition and wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse is essentially a specialized database that’s designed to handle analytics queries. The service has proven to be popular among enterprises. It runs on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, enabling companies to analyze and process vast amounts of data to try to unlock business insights. The benefits of Snowflake’s data warehouse wasn’t lost on investors either, with the company closing on two separate funding rounds of $263 million and $450 million in 2018 alone.

Prior to joining Snowflake, Muglia made his name at Microsoft, where he ran the company’s server and tools business. He spent 23 years at the Redmond, Washington firm before leaving for Snowflake.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Muglia’s departure was a surprise, but that the company board deserved credit for finding an experienced CEO to replace him so quickly.

“Now we will have to wait and see if Slootman will replace a lot of executives or work with the [existing] team and take Snowflake to the next level,” Mueller said. “If this will be a repeat of his time at ServiceNow, we can expect him to try and adapt Snowflake’s technology for new use cases, and maybe new verticals.”

Muglia previously appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during his earlier years at the company, when he talked about how its cloud-based service was helping companies to get a better handle on their data:

Photo: SiliconANGLE