Like a winter storm that suddenly comes down from a mountain and drops two feet of snow on a town’s unprepared residents, Snowflake Inc.’s eye-popping initial public offering in September became the largest U.S. software company IPO in history. Wasn’t the data warehouse market supposed to be dead?

The company’s record-setting valuation, which recently hovered around $77 billion, opened a lot of eyes to a trend in the enterprise tech world that had actually been evolving for some time. The data warehousing market is being transformed through Snowflake’s steadfast vision of creating a highly scalable, centralized and simple solution, tailor-made for a new class of workloads emerging in the cloud.

“Data warehousing is old, slow, cumbersome, expensive and resource intensive,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE Media’s sister market research firm Wikibon and host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. “It’s failed to live up to expectations of near real-time access to data. Snowflake attacked that problem and breathed life back into the stagnant data warehouse market by making it simpler and cloud native.”

TheCUBE will interview Snowflake executives and thought leaders in a virtual broadcast during Data Cloud Summit 2020 on Nov. 17. Coverage of the event will focus on product news and use cases, value offered by the data cloud, data governance and security, Snowflake’s record-breaking IPO and the firm’s position in the market versus major cloud providers. (* Disclosure below.)

Scalable and cloud native

That Snowflake would achieve a significant milestone with its September IPO was not necessarily a surprise to those who have followed the company closely. Two statistics gleaned from the firm’s website offer a glimpse into why investors might take a major interest.

There are 515 million data workloads currently running on Snowflake’s cloud platform every day, and the company has 250 petabytes of data under management. To put that last statistic in perspective, the total amount of data processed by search giant Google Inc. is a mere 20 petabytes per day.

Yet, Snowflake’s enterprise popularity goes well beyond its scalability. Snowflake’s platform offers tools to store, retrieve, analyze and process data from a readily accessible system. And the firm has also made its cloud native commitment perfectly clear.

“We’re not doing this endless hedging that people have done for 20 years, sort of keeping a leg in both worlds,” Frank Slootman, chairman and chief executive of Snowflake, said during a CUBE interview earlier this year. “Forget it. This will only work in the public cloud. People will come to the public cloud a lot sooner than we’ll ever come to the private cloud.”

This cloud native commitment has, so far, given Snowflake some distinct advantages. It allows the company to take maximum advantage of features and APIs in multiple cloud platforms to deliver efficiency, high performance, low latency and security, all highly prized by enterprises today.

Snowflake has packaged its competitive edge into a label it calls the “data cloud.” In the data cloud, Snowflake’s architecture delivers near-unlimited storage and compute in real time, while supporting workloads across multiple clouds with warehousing, engineering, data science and application development.

If data is going to sit at the center of enterprise business, the data cloud is there to embrace it with open arms.

“There is a new breed of data-centric workloads emerging in the cloud, which take advantage of cloud native capabilities to scale storage independent of compute, share data and do so in a governed and secure manner,” Vellante noted. “Simplified and secure access to shared data in the cloud is changing the way organizations approach putting data at the core of their businesses. The market potential is enormous, and this idea of a so-called data cloud is compelling to organizations that want to create a data-first culture.”

Complex landscape

Snowflake’s cloud-native approach also presents an unusual competitive situation. At the same time Snowflake runs on Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, those public cloud providers also offer customers similar solutions through Redshift, Synapse and BigQuery. Cloud providers want enterprises to store data in public cloud databases and use proprietary products. Yet, independent software vendors like Snowflake also bring customers in the door.

“The relationships with the public cloud companies is one of frequent inquiry,” Slootman said in a statement to investors earlier this year. “We are becoming large customers and consumers of public cloud capacity, as well as partners and competitors, all at once. It can be frustrating, sometimes even bewildering, from one day to the next. But we are now trending better with all three.”

Snowflake’s complex relationship with AWS offers an example of how this dynamic is playing out. Amazon is reported to be Snowflake’s biggest vendor, with a contract for Snowflake to spend $1.2 billion on AWS technology and services over the next five years.

Meanwhile, Snowflake has taken approximately 2,500 customers from Amazon’s Redshift, according to Slootman. AWS has responded by enhancing the capabilities offered by Redshift, with the introduction of Aqua in December to speed the query process by 10 times better performance than other data warehouse vendors, according to the company.

“It’s a rapidly evolving competitive landscape,” Zane Chrane, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said in a recent interview. “AWS Redshift probably has the largest cloud data warehouse with the most customers and revenue, but it’s the oldest. Snowflake has been one of the most disruptive new vendors in the enterprise space in the last few years.”

Snowflake’s Slootman previously took two other companies public before making IPO history in September. The CEO is an ardent sailor, winning the Transpac Honolulu race in 2017 when he piloted his sailboat named “The Invisible Hand.”

Based on Snowflake’s rapid rise on Wall Street and growing presence in the cloud native enterprise data world, neither Slootman nor his company will likely be invisible anymore.

Livestream of Data Cloud Summit

Data Cloud Summit is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcast on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of Data Cloud Summit, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during Data Cloud Summit

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during Data Cloud Summit include Snowflake executives Frank Slootman, chairman and chief executive officer; Benoit Dageville, co-founder and president of products; Sunny Bedi, chief information officer and chief data officer; Colleen Kapase, vice president of worldwide partnerships and alliances; Chris Degnan, chief revenue officer; Matt Glickman, vice president of customer product strategy; and Denise Persson, chief marketing officer of Snowflake Inc. TheCUBE will also speak with Snowflake’s Allison Lee, director of engineering and founding engineer;  Abdul Munir, senior engineering manager and founding engineer; Ashish Motivala, senior engineering manager and founding engineer; and Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake Inc.

Other guests to be interviewed on theCUBE include Anita Lynch, vice president of data governance, instrumentation and data architecture, Disney Streaming Services, at The Walt Disney Co.; Casey McGee, vice president of global ISV sales at Microsoft; Ann-Christel Graham, chief revenue officer at Talend; Mark Nelson, executive vice president of product development at Tableau Software; and Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, vice president of storage at AWS.

Additional interviews include Florian Douetteau, chief executive officer of Dataiku; Laura Langdon, chief marketing officer of Wipro; Scott Holden, chief marketing officer of ThoughtSpot; and Aimee Irwin, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Experian.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Data Cloud Summit 2020. Neither Snowflake, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Snowflake