During its fourth annual user conference this week, Snowflake Inc. released new product announcements and hosted its second annual Startup Challenge.

A key focus during the event was around Snowflake’s advancing innovation and partnerships.

“One of our big announcements here this week is around building native data apps in Snowflake. Now you can both build the apps and you can distribute and monetize them in our marketplace,” said Denise Persson (pictured), Snowflake’s chief marketing officer.

Persson spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed bringing the Summit to life, the Snowflake Startup Challenge, key announcements and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Success through partnership

The role of Snowflake’s partners is critical to its data cloud narrative and overall success, according to Persson.

“The foundation is the core capabilities of our platform, but it’s also all the data that other companies can access from our customers,” she said. “All of the applications and capabilities that are built by our partners who are the ones doing the work with our customers and migrating the data to Snowflake and the data cloud are helping these companies build new business models.”

This week, Snowflake made a number of important announcements, many of which have been in development for years. They include support for transactional workloads, a broader set of tools for data science and machine learning, and the ability to ingest streaming data.

“Our most exciting announcement is about the native apps capabilities and that finally we can bring the work to the data and not take the data to the work,” Persson said. “Our mission has been around breaking down the data silos, because those have been the biggest challenges companies have faced.”

Customers want to do business with vendors that partner well, which helps Snowflake’s mission, according to Persson.

“Every morning, we ask how we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes,” she said. “We don’t solve [their problems] alone. We solve them with 200-plus partners.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake Summit event:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE