Snowflake Inc. said today that it is expanding its partnership with Microsoft Corp. to support a connector that enables bidirectional access between Microsoft’s Dataverse platform for copilot development and the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

Snowflake said the connector simplifies interoperability between Microsoft’s Power Platform low-code/no-code suite, Dynamics 365 business applications and data stored in Snowflake.

“We are on a mission to help organizations un-silo data,” said Christian Kleinerman, executive vice president of product at Snowflake. “We have all the standard connectivity touch points, but I don’t think we’ve had a good path, for example, to make Microsoft Dynamics data available for Snowflake customers or Snowflake users to be able to reason through that data from Snowflake.”

The integration eliminates the need for customers of both services to create custom workflows, a capability that Snowflake said will dramatically reduce the time spent on resource and infrastructure management.

“If they write the code themselves, it could be the difference between weeks and months and a two-minute connector,” Kleinerman said. “The benefits are different from Microsoft’s and Snowflake’s sides. A Microsoft customer may want to build an application or an agent that takes action on data stored in Snowflake, so now we are making the data available. On the Snowflake side, if you’re building a dashboard or an agent and want to reason based on your Microsoft Dynamics data, that is now available on both sides.”

The connection doesn’t allow direct access to Microsoft or Snowflake data. Rather, it synchronizes data using an intermediary storage layer like Apache Iceberg. In May, the two companies announced a partnership that allows applications that use the Iceberg or Delta Lake storage formats to interoperate with Microsoft’s Fabric data analytics suite using the OneLake data lake.

Kleinerman said interoperability is part of Snowflake’s philosophy of giving customers full data control. Some enterprise resource planning vendors, he said, “see the data stored in their applications as theirs, not their customers’,” he said. “We like what Microsoft is doing, which is to say if you have data in Dynamics, you own it, program it, and you can analyze it.”

The connector is currently in private preview with a small number of customers. General availability is planned for next year.

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