Cloud players have made it abundantly clear: Ecosystems are important, but so are marketplaces. At Data Cloud Summit, one of the prominent companies using the Snowflake Marketplace is RelationalAI Inc.

At the event, details were unveiled about how RelationalAI is building on its relationship with Snowflake Inc., with the public launch of its Snowflake Native App on the Snowflake Marketplace. Using Snowflake Marketplace has made all the difference, according to Molham Aref (pictured, left), chief executive officer of RelationalAI.

Molham Aref of RelationalAI talks to theCUBE about the Snowflake Native App Framework.

“Whenever you’re starting a company and taking something to market, you have to have two things,” he said. “You have to have a great product and that we know how to do, that’s something you control, and you also have to have distribution because a great product without distribution is not going to have any impact.”

Aref and Prasanna Krishnan (right), senior director of product management, collaboration and Snowflake Marketplace at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE analysts Dave Vellante and Rebecca Knight at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the impact of Snowflake Marketplace on enterprise AI applications and how companies are monetizing native apps. (* Disclosure below.)

Native apps and monetization enhancements outlined

One important announcement made during Data Cloud Summit involved native apps working with Snowpark Container Services, now in public preview, according to Krishnan. The company also announced the ability for companies to monetize native apps, using a new mode of charging.

“Which is the ability to price per credit. What RelationalAI can do is charge a certain dollar per credit that is being used by the RelationalAI native app, running on the Snowflake AI data cloud,” Krishnan said. “That is really powerful because as a consumer, I pay for exactly what I use, and as the provider of the application, RelationalAI doesn’t have to worry about how do we meter and bill. Snowflake takes care of all of that.”

Snowflake, now an AI platform and a platform for developing intelligent data apps, is clearly evolving quickly. It goes back to the central innovation that Snowflake started with, which was separating storage from compute, according to Krishnan.

“That’s what enabled us to do analytics without limits in the first phase of Snowflake. It’s that same innovation of separating storage from compute that is enabling us to do sharing of data as well as sharing of applications and bringing applications to the data,” Krishnan said. “AI is just a natural extension of that.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Data Cloud Summit:

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. and RelationalAI Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake, RelationalAI nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE