Snowflake Concludes its Largest Data, Apps, and AI Event with New Innovations that Bring Generative AI
Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, last week concluded its fifth-annual Snowflake Summit conference and its largest data, apps, and AI event with nearly 12,000 in-person attendees live in Las Vegas, Nevada from June 26-29, and over 11,000 registered virtually. The four-day conference brought together customers, partners, technical experts, and executives from around the world as Snowflake unveiled new innovations that enable customers to bring generative AI to their data and build apps at scale — all within the secure and governed environment of the Data Cloud. Snowflake Summit also featured four marquee keynotes, 440+ total sessions spanning 11 different session tracks, 250+ customer speakers, 200+ ecosystem partners, 20+ hands-on labs, hundreds of SnowPro™ certifications achieved by conference goers, and more.
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Snowflake Chairman and CEO, Frank Slootman, and NVIDIA’s Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, kicked off the event on Monday, June 26 with a fireside chat discussing the impact AI, large language models (LLMs), and GPU-accelerated computing are having on every industry and business model. Snowflake and NVIDIA also unveiled that they are partnering to provide businesses of all sizes with an accelerated path to create customized generative AI applications using their own proprietary data, all securely within the Snowflake Data Cloud. This was followed by the Tuesday, June 27 Snowflake Summit Opening Keynote, which featured Slootman, Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Product, Benoit Dageville, Snowflake SVP of Product, Christian Kleinerman, and Snowflake SVP and Co-Founder of Neeva, Sridhar Ramaswamy, as they revealed the expanded capabilities and product innovations advancing the Data Cloud:
- Snowpark Container Services: Snowflake introduced Snowpark Containers Services, currently in private preview, enabling developers to deploy, manage, and scale generative AI, full-stack apps, and more — including configurable infrastructure options such as GPUs — all securely within Snowflake. Snowflake customers will also get access to an expansive set of third-party services including LLMs, Notebooks, MLOps tools, and more within their account.
- Document AI: Snowflake launched a new Snowflake-developed LLM, currently in private preview, built from the recent acquisition of Applica and its pioneering generative AI technology, to help customers understand documents and extract insights from unstructured data without machine learning expertise.
- Iceberg Tables: With Iceberg Tables, in private preview soon, organizations can work with data in their own storage in the Apache Iceberg format, whether that data is managed by Snowflake or managed externally, while still benefiting from Snowflake’s ease of use, performance, and unified governance.
- Snowflake Performance Index: Snowflake regularly passes on savings to customers in the form of performance improvements. The new Snowflake Performance Index (SPI) provides increased transparency and metrics around Snowflake’s ongoing performance improvements, revealing that query duration has improved by 15 percent1 for stable customer workloads since Snowflake began tracking this metric over the last eight months — reinforcing how Snowflake continues to advance price per performance for customers.
- Snowflake Native App Framework: Snowflake unveiled that the Snowflake Native App Framework, currently in public preview on AWS, is now available for developers to build and test Snowflake Native Apps, with over 25 new Snowflake Native Apps now available for customers to install from Snowflake Marketplace and run against data in their Snowflake account.
- Snowflake Marketplace Advancements: Data exclusively available in the Data Cloud on Snowflake Marketplace is expanding with Cybersyn providing proprietary economic datasets for corporations, investors, and governments. To enable customers to effortlessly tap into this expanding library of data offerings, Snowflake also introduced the Marketplace Capacity Drawdown Program, generally available, allowing customers to seamlessly buy data and Snowflake Native Apps with their Snowflake Capacity commitment.
- Improved Developer Experiences and Expanded Streaming Capabilities: Snowflake highlighted a set of new capabilities targeted at developers – Snowpark ML APIs for more efficient model development, currently in public preview; Snowpark Model Registry, currently in private preview, for scalable MLOps; Streamlit in Snowflake advancements, public preview coming soon, to turn models into interactive apps; and advanced streaming capabilities.
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On Wednesday, June 28 Snowflake hosted its Builder’s Keynote with Dageville, Snowflake Director of Product and Co-Founder of Streamlit, Amanda Kelly, Snowflake Director of Product Management, James Malone, and several members of Snowflake’s developer relations team. The keynote highlighted how organizations can go from raw data to production-grade data pipelines, ML models, and apps, and featured testimonials from customers EDF Energy and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). To round out the conference, Kleinerman moderated a keynote panel on Thursday, June 29 featuring Landing AI’s Founder & CEO Andrew Ng, Microsoft’s VP Azure AI Ali Dalloul, and NVIDIA’s VP of Applied Research Jonathan Cohen, discussing their predictions on the impact of generative LLMs for enterprises.
Snowflake Invests in its Ecosystem of Customers and Partners Building with the Data Cloud
Over 250 customer sessions from organizations like AstraZeneca, ExxonMobil, Fidelity Investments, Okta, PetSmart, Saks, Warner Bros. Discovery, and more shared best practices and strategies for advancing data-driven outcomes. Additionally, Disney was named the 2023 Data Drivers Awards winner for North America, the premier Data Cloud awards that honor Snowflake customers leading their organizations and reimagining what’s possible with the Data Cloud across their industries. AstraZeneca was named the Data Drivers Awards winner for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Spark New Zealand was named the Data Drivers Awards winner for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).
Snowflake’s expansive partner ecosystem shared over 100 announcements around Snowflake Summit, highlighting how organizations are leveraging the Data Cloud to transform their industries with joint solutions, AI and ML strategies, leading data apps, and more. Additionally, Snowflake shared record growth with over 970 partners building Powered by Snowflake applications (as of April 30, 2023), and over 430 partners with public listings on Snowflake Marketplace (as of April 30, 2023). As Snowflake continues to invest in its ecosystem of partners, Snowflake announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft, enabling new product integrations across generative AI, data governance, low code/no code application development, and more. Additionally, Snowflake and Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now leverage Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler with a direct access feature that allows customers to seamlessly integrate with the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Amid the customer and partner excitement, Snowflake Summit recognized early-stage companies that are leveraging Snowflake to build innovative applications and products in the 2023 Snowflake Startup Challenge. Hundreds of organizations entered the Startup Challenge to compete for a chance to be one of the three finalists, where they can receive up to a combined $1M in potential investments from Snowflake Ventures, and exclusive mentorship and visibility opportunities from NYSE. Judges including Dageville, Snowflake CMO, Denise Persson, NYSE’s CIO, Chuck Adkins, and Altimeter’s Founder and CEO, Brad Gerstner, announced Maxa as the ultimate winner for its Snowflake Native App that automates financial and operations ERP insights quickly, without requiring special skills and all within a Snowflake customer’s account. Snowflake also announced Snowflake Ventures’ investment in Reka (June 2023) and partnership with AI21 to help more customers unlock the value of their enterprise data with LLMs. In addition, Snowflake Ventures announced an investment in Cart.com (June 2023) to provide deeper analytics and increased collaboration for joint customers, and shared new details around the future of LLMs in Snowflake following its acquisition of Neeva (May 2023).
Snowflake Brings Snowflake Summit 2024 Back to San Francisco, Embracing Its Founding Roots
Snowflake Summit 2024 concluded by announcing that Snowflake Summit 2024 will be held on June 3-6, 2024 in San Francisco, California. Snowflake’s inaugural user conference, Snowflake Summit 2019, was held in San Francisco, and the Data Cloud company will be welcoming Snowflake Summit 2024 back to the Bay Area where it was originally founded. Organizations from around the world are invited to join Snowflake Summit 2024 as Snowflake continues to innovate and drive impact for its customers with the Data Cloud. Save the date for Snowflake Summit 2024, here.
“San Francisco has been at the heart of technology and innovation for decades, fostering an environment that celebrates innovation and creativity that make a positive impact, changing the way our society functions,” said London N. Breed, Mayor of San Francisco. “Snowflake is no exception, serving as a great example of a leading company that’s driving impactful change across industries. We are thrilled to welcome Snowflake Summit 2024 and its global attendees next year, and can’t wait to make it snow in San Francisco.”
“Mobilizing data is a business imperative, and Snowflake Summit 2023 showed us just how powerful organizations are when they embrace their data to build game-changing innovations in the Data Cloud,” said Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake. “At this year’s event, we brought together some of the world’s leading data and AI experts to learn, share, and explore new ways to propel their industries forward, and I’m excited to see how we continue to push these boundaries as we return to San Francisco for Snowflake Summit 2024.”
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