SC

Strategy Canon

Snowflake: sourced choices

33 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2012Product · Build from scratch Implementation of a new data warehouse began in late 2012, with a processing engine written from scratch rather than based on Hadoop or PostgreSQL. SN2
  2. 2012Product · Cloud only The founders planned a full data platform built entirely in the cloud, decoupling compute from data. SN8
  3. 2012-08Go_To_Market · Incubation Mike Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures served as chief executive and chief financial officer from August 2012 to June 2014. SN1
  4. 2013Go_To_Market · Feedback outreach The first salesperson emailed about 2,000 prospects a week asking for feedback and set eight customer meetings a week. SN21
  5. 2013-11Go_To_Market · First sales hire Chris Degnan joined as director of sales in November 2013, while the company was in stealth. SN1
  6. 2014Go_To_Market · First customers First customers in 2014, the year the platform was first offered for sale. SN1
  7. 2014Go_To_Market · Early terms Early customers were asked to try the product and pay if they used it; the first ten kept founders pricing. SN21
  8. 2014-05Go_To_Market · Chief executive Offer letter to Bob Muglia as chief executive in May 2014; Speiser served until June 2014. SN1
  9. 2014-10-21Go_To_Market · Out of stealth Snowflake left stealth with a $26 million Series B led by Redpoint. SN23
  10. 2015-06Product · General availability Generally available on Amazon Web Services from June 2015. SN2
  11. 2016-06Product · Storage and compute separated Virtual warehouses are compute clusters that can be created, resized or shut down without affecting stored data. SN2
  12. 2016-06Product · No tuning knobs The service has no physical design or tuning tasks for users; its one tuning parameter is how much performance the user wants to pay for. SN2
  13. 2016-06Product · Semi-structured data Built-in SQL extensions and columnar storage for JSON and Avro data. SN2
  14. 2016-06Go_To_Market · Pay for use Users pay only for the storage and compute resources they use. SN2
  15. 2017-06Product · Data sharing Accounts can share live data with other accounts without copying it; consumers pay for the compute they use on it. SN14
  16. 2017-06-30Go_To_Market · Capital One agreement Master agreement with Capital One under which order forms buy prepaid capacity, with service-level credits and a regulator termination right. SN1
  17. 2018-07-12Product · Azure preview Snowflake became available in preview on Microsoft Azure. SN15
  18. 2018-09-26Product · Azure general availability General availability on Microsoft Azure. SN16
  19. 2018-09-26Go_To_Market · Customer choice Muglia presented Azure availability as customer choice. SN16
  20. 2019Product · Data Exchange Snowflake introduced its Data Exchange to extend data sharing. SN1
  21. 2019-04Go_To_Market · New chief executive Frank Slootman, former ServiceNow chief executive, became CEO in April 2019. SN1
  22. 2020-02-18Product · Google Cloud General availability on Google Cloud, with database replication across clouds. SN19
  23. 2020-03-18Go_To_Market · Data Marketplace listing Starschema listed COVID-19 data on the Data Marketplace; hundreds of customers consumed it by July 2020. SN1
  24. 2020-06Product · Cloud-agnostic layer A layer abstracts each cloud so the same service and applications run on all three, linked by a global data mesh. SN17
  25. 2020-08Go_To_Market · Consumption fees Storage is charged by average terabytes a month, compute by resource type and duration, and data transfer by terabytes moved. SN1
  26. 2020-08Go_To_Market · Capacity contracts Most customers sign annual capacity arrangements, can consume past them and roll over unused capacity on buying more. SN1
  27. 2020-08Go_To_Market · Direct sales A direct sales force of sales development, inside and field sales, segmented by customer size, with a recent focus on large enterprises. SN1
  28. 2020-08Go_To_Market · Expansion motion After adoption, sales focus on moving more customer workloads onto the platform; net revenue retention was 158 percent at July 31, 2020. SN1
  29. 2020-09Go_To_Market · Listing Snowflake went public in September 2020. SN26
  30. 2022-07Go_To_Market · Industry organization Go-to-market reorganized around industries such as financial services, media and healthcare. SN28
  31. 2024-06-10Product · Iceberg tables Apache Iceberg tables became generally available, with data in customer-managed storage readable by other engines. SN3
  32. 2025Product · Open Catalog Snowflake offered an open catalog and Iceberg interoperability. SN4
  33. Go_To_Market · Per-second billing Warehouse credits are billed per second after a one-minute minimum; suspended warehouses are not billed. SN25