Event coverage from theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, was in high gear this past week, with industry analysts Dave Vellante and John Furrier on location, providing exclusive insights from Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas and the Data + AI Summit in San Francisco.

Though the schedule was packed, it didn’t stop Vellante (pictured, left) and Furrier (right) from filming the latest episode of theCUBE podcast, where they spoke about what they were seeing from the show floors. Plus, this week’s episode included a conversation with Frank Slootman, chairman and chief executive officer of Snowflake Inc.

Of course, Snowflake Summit and the Data + AI Summit were held during the same week this year, but Snowflake announced on theCUBE that they would be holding next year’s event in Moscone Center in San Francisco during the first week of June.

“Yeah, and not even head-to-head with Databricks,” Furrier said.

Analysts pleased with Databricks

During the Data + AI Summit, Databricks Inc. “hit a home run” with analyst grades all straight-As, according to Furrier. It was also a homerun in Furrier’s eyes, though he would give the event an A-.

“Mainly because they didn’t have a semantic layer angle,” he said. “I talked to Sanjeev Mohan, he was on theCUBE, by the way, with you. He and I both agree that Databricks hit a home run, but they don’t have a semantic layer story. And their answer to this is that AI will take care of it. So, this little nuance there.”

That leaves an opportunity for companies, such as AtScale Inc. and others who have this semantic layer brewing, according to Furrier.

Generative artificial intelligence, of course, is hitting everything, from the physical storage layer to compute, all the way to the application.

“To me, that’s the big story here … generative AI isn’t just a fad or any specific thing in the stack. It’s going to enable innovation up and down the stack from the physical layer, all the way to the application layer,” Furrier said.

Story at Snowflake is all data, all workloads

Over at the Snowflake Summit, the story was surrounding all data, all workloads, at a high level.

Down below, it’s all about taking multiple ways to query the data, in multiple data formats, with all its complexity, and bringing it into a single coherent view, according to Vellante.

“We saw the extension of the new query types with Neeva, which basically takes natural language processing and translates it into SQL. That’s, at least, the plan,” Vellante said. “It’s interesting. Neeva was a consumer LLM, consumer search kind of disrupter. And Snowflake’s thrown that away, bought the company and said, ‘Oh, no, we’re going to apply this to enterprise.’”

The “secret sauce” of Snowflake is in pulling different unique data types together, according to Vellante. But the company also didn’t have an answer for the semantic layer, something that Vellante referred to as an “open game” to consider as data apps are built.

“I don’t think either of these companies has the answer yet to the semantic layer. Whether it’s dbt or AtScale, remains to be seen,” he said.

A conversation with Frank Slootman

This week’s podcast included a conversation with Frank Slootman, chairman and chief executive officer of Snowflake, in which Slootman discussed the company’s evolution, as well as its strategies when it came to AI, the company’s optimized database engine and more.

One question Vellante asked during that conversation was when it came to skeptics in the room asking about the company’s expansion into new markets, how might Slootman address that, and what was the narrative there?

For Snowflake as a data cloud, it’s a multi-layered approach, according to Slootman, with infrastructure elasticity, live data management, a complete workload enablement layer, the programmability platform called Snowpark, a marketplace, and a transactional model for monetizing data and applications.

“The strategy, really, is … we enable data engineers, big time,” he said.

These days, Snowflake has “completely embraced” the functional layer that lives above the data layer, according to Slootman. There are data engineers and software engineers, and the company now embraces both those audiences.

“It’s a big vision, but we think in the cloud, you have this,” he said.

Watch the full theCUBE Podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Matei Zaharia, co-founder and chief technologist at Databricks Inc.

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Databricks

Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo

Sharon Zhou. Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Lamini

Matt Garman, SVP of sales and marketing at AWS Inc.

Jensen Huang, president, founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp.

Denise Persson, chief marketing officer at Snowflake Inc.

Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of Mosaic ML Inc.

Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corp.

Larry Ellison, chairman of the board and CTO at Oracle Corp.

Doug Merritt, chairman, president and CEO of Aviatrix Systems Inc.

Benoit Dageville, president of product and co-founder of Snowflake

Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake

Terry Hardie, principal software engineer at Snowflake

Mihir Shah, chief information officer at Fidelity Investment

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Photo: SiliconANGLE