The announcement was part of a larger rollout of multiple new services, updates, and offerings from Snowflake at the company’s annual Snowflake Summit. Snowflake went public in September and beat revenue expectations in Q1, bringing in $214 million in product revenue. Snowflake senior vice president Christian Kleinerman said during a press conference that the company was looking to “reduce friction” and “simplify the process by which our customers have access to the data they need, when they need it.” He added that the Data Marketplace would help enterprises derive value from data as they collect more and more digital information. Snowflake Data Marketplace is already in use by a number of companies like Albertsons and healthcare organizations that need access to near real-time data in order to personalize customer experiences, share granular item- and store-level point-of-sale data, use data insights to improve the quality of patient care, and optimize commercial go-to-market effectiveness, according to the company. Kleinerman and Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman also noted that the Data Marketplace will change how customers buy data and “simplify secure data sharing both for data consumers and data providers.” Snowflake will offer customers access to sample data sets that can be tested and analyzed as well as “usage-based purchase options.” In addition to the marketplace, Snowflake unveiled more tools designed to help companies with data programmability, global data governance, platform optimizations, and more. Snowpark, which has initial support for Java and Scala, was built specifically with data engineers, data scientists, and developers in mind. The developer experience offers an all-in-one platform that lets developers build tools using their favorite languages and programming concepts, while also executing workloads “directly within Snowflake.” Developers will also have access to Java user-defined-functions, the Snowflake SQL API, and other tools to manage unstructured data. To further empower their network of partners, Snowflake also revealed work on a “Powered by Snowflake” program which provides technical experts, workshops, and architecture design assistance. “Hundreds of companies from the largest enterprises to early-stage startups have built amazing applications – and often their entire businesses – on top of Snowflake,” Kleinerman told reporters. “Based on their feedback, we developed the Powered by Snowflake program to make it even easier for software innovators to bring groundbreaking applications to market that redefine industry standards and supercharge business growth.” Instacart VP of Infrastructure Dustin Pearce said the company has worked with Snowflake through this program to create applications for the more than 600 national and regional retailers they work with. The applications help their retail partners by providing data on purchasing trends and other insights. Pearce said the program’s workshops focused on design optimization and access controls, which enabled Instacart to significantly accelerate the development timeline for the company’s new retailer insights tools. “Being able to more seamlessly process product and availability data and share that back with retail partners in real time enables Instacart to help retailers gain an even clearer picture of what’s happening on their store shelves, and ultimately drive more growth for their businesses,” Pearce said.
