UPDATED 15:04 EDT / DECEMBER 21 2020

CLOUD

Competitive race in the cloud data warehousing market gets interesting

The impact of Snowflake Inc. in the enterprise tech world extends well beyond its becoming the largest software initial public offering in history. The company is beginning to eat into the overall market share of competitors in the cloud data warehousing market based on revenue, to the point where it may potentially supplant all of the major cloud providers.

That was one conclusion from recent data analysis provided by 7Park Data Inc., a research firm that analyzes real-time spending to provide transparency for the cloud database market.

“Within this cloud infrastructure data set, we’re tracking several billion dollars-worth of spend across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform,” said Sagar Kadakia (pictured), head of enterprise information technology at 7Park Data. “At least within the data warehousing space, you are seeing spend go toward Snowflake. It’s definitely turning into a battle royal as we move into 2021.”

Kadakia spoke recently with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed the source of 7Park Data’s metrics, Snowflake’s impact on both Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform, and reasons behind the shifting market dynamics.

Analyzing granular spending data

Kadakia’s company analyzes IT department spend from cost management software for visibility into transactions and usage.

“It’s real-time data; we get this aggregated daily,” Kadakia explained. “This is certainly different than your traditional providers who may be giving you quarterly or biannual data. This is incredibly granular and real time, all the way down to the invoice level.”

What 7Park Data’s analysis revealed was that the market share of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Redshift cloud data warehouse declined from 2% to 1.5%, based on revenue. Kadakia attributed this decline to spending preferences shown, in particular, by new customers since the third quarter of 2019.

“They were bringing down the spend increase. and it’s because a lot of spend that was perhaps meant for Redshift is now going to Snowflake,” Kadakia said.

AWS is not the only major cloud provider to feel the impact of Snowflake’s market influence. Google Cloud Platform, with its BigQuery cloud data warehouse, is experiencing a decline as well.

“A dynamic that we’re seeing among BigQuery is we’re seeing adoption rates fall versus this time last year,” Kadakia said.

Developer influence

One factor that may be driving this trend is that developers have more influence now in spending decisions compared with a previous dynamic where data warehouse direction was dictated organizationally from the top.

“When it comes to data warehousing, we’re seeing a lot of decisions come from the bottom up now, so a lot of developers have a preference for Snowflake,” Kadakia said.

The recent analysis comes at a time when there are a number of factors at play in the cloud data warehousing market. Snowflake has captured its share of the market through what it calls the “Data Cloud,” a mesh concept that supports multiple workloads across many clouds.

AWS rolled out its own version of this recently thorough the introduction of AWS Glue Elastic Views, which makes it easier to move data from one purpose-built data store to another.

Not to be left out, Microsoft Corp. has recently launched general availability of its Azure Synapse Analytics cloud data warehousing platform.

“This is a really hot market,” Kadakia said. “It’s an interesting area to watch.”

Here’s the complete video interview, one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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