According to a recent report, the global data warehouse as a service market is predicted to grow from $1.4 billion in 2019 to $23.8 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 29% driven by increased digitization that is resulting in the creation of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in huge amounts. Businesses realize the importance of leveraging this data to derive useful insights to make better decisions and are investing heavily in storing, managing, and analyzing big data. San Mateo-based Snowflake is a leading data warehouse solution provider that went public in September last year.

Snowflake’s Financials

Snowflake was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski. It provides “data warehouse-as-a-service” (DWaaS) to enable enterprise users to store and analyze data. It’s patented new architecture is the centerpiece for data pipelines, data warehousing, data lakes, and data application development, and is used for building data exchanges to easily and securely share governed data. Snowflake is also a powerful query processing back-end platform for developers creating modern data-driven applications.

The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform provides a SaaS-delivered DWaaS built for the cloud. By providing capabilities such as data sharing, data lake, data replication, and custom development capabilities, it also serves as a data PaaS. It delivers PaaS-like functionality and the built-in data warehouse design flexibility developers need to power applications for BI, AI, machine learning, IoT, and more.

It also offers a Snowflake Data Marketplace that gives data scientists, business intelligence, and analytics professionals access to over 375 live and ready-to-query data sets from more than 125 third-party data providers and data service providers. The marketplace helps reduce the costs and effort associated with the traditional processes of data ingestion and transformation. It data services insurance, retail, life sciences, media & entertainment industries, and the public sector.

For the recently reported third quarter, Snowflake’s revenues grew 119% to $159.6 million. Product revenues grew 115% to $148.5 million. The remaining performance obligations grew 240% to $927.9 million. Net revenue retention rate was 162%. For the quarter, Snowflake had 65 customers with a trailing twelve-month revenue of more than $1 million.

GAAP net loss of $168.9 million grew significantly compared to GAAP net loss of $88.1 million a year ago. Non-GAAP net loss per share was $1.01, compared to non-GAAP net loss per share of $1.92 a year ago.

For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, the company expects product revenues of $162-$167 million and product revenues of $538-$543 million for the year.

Prior to going public, Snowflake had raised $1.4 billion in funding from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Dragoneer Investment Group, Meritech Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Capital One Growth Ventures. It is last funding round was held in February 2020 when it raised $479 million at a valuation of $12.4 billion.

Snowflake’s Product Enhancements

During the recent quarter, Snowflake announced an expanded partnership with Salesforce. Native integrations between Salesforce and Snowflake will allow organizations to easily unify and analyze all data in the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform and visualize it with business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Salesforce applications. Organizations will be able to see new insights about their businesses and their customers. As part of the partnership, it released two key products – the Einstein Analytics Output Connector for Snowflake and Einstein Analytics Direct Data for Snowflake.

The Analytics Output Connector is a native integration that enables joint customers to move their Salesforce data into Snowflake seamlessly. It will allow customers to query the two data sources and use existing business intelligence tools such as Einstein Analytics and Tableau. The Analytics Direct Data integration enables Einstein Analytics users to query directly the data a customer has in Snowflake. This includes their Salesforce data and data generated from their business applications, mobile apps, web activity, and IoT devices.

As part of its data governance strategy, Snowflake also announced the introduction of row access policies, tagging, and column masking. This will help customers control access by user type in a highly granular fashion. These capabilities are essential to grow on the Data Cloud and Snowflake expects more platform enhancements going forward.

Snowflake’s Developer Focus

Meanwhile, Snowflake remained focused on its developer services. It recently announced Snow Park, its new developer experience that will enable users to write code in their preferred language to build data transformations and score machine learning models, all processed by Snowflake.

Last summer, Snowflake had announced the launch of Snowflake Partner Network (SPN), an ecosystem of Technology and Services partners for customers to leverage their adoption of Snowflake’s single, integrated platform. The SPN offers different tiers and benefits for Services and Technology partners. Services partners like Deloitte and Interworks can support Snowflake customers from migration to implementation so organizations can take full benefits of Snowflake. Technology partners like Informatica, Talend, and ThoughtSpot empower Snowflake customers with the tools and resources to develop and deliver joint solutions for realizing the full benefits of the cloud data platform’s ease-of-use, performance, reliability, and security.

Snowflake currently has more than 45,000 developers on its platform. These Snowflake users are able to access an ecosystem where they can share knowledge, seek help, exchange ideas, and collaborate with each other. Its multi-cluster shared data architecture creates additional compute clusters to support a near-unlimited number of concurrent users on shared tables without contention for resources, thus allowing developers to power applications with no limitations on performance, concurrency, or scale. Developers can use ANSI SQL to query structured and semi-structured data and they can ingest JSON, Avro, Parquet, and other data without transformations or having to fix the pipeline every time the schema changes.

Snowflake went public in September last year on the NYSE under the ticker SNOW at $120 a share. The stock soon soared to $308.71. It raised $3.4 billion from its IPO at a valuation of $33.2 billion. Its stock is currently trading at $314.29 with a market capitalization of $88.9 billion.