>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you Data Driven Insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the pre-cloud era hardware companies would run benchmarks, showing how database and or application performance ran better on their systems relative to competitors or previous generation boxes. And they would make a big deal out of it. And the independent software vendors, you know they'd do a little golf clap if you will, in the form of a joint press release it became a game of leaprog amongst hardware competitors. That was pretty commonplace over the years. The Dell Snowflake Deal underscores that the value proposition between hardware companies and ISVs is changing and has much more to do with distribution channels, volumes and the amount of data that lives On-Prem in various storage platforms. For cloud native ISVs like Snowflake they're realizing that despite their Cloud only dogma they have to grit their teeth and deal with On-premises data or risk getting shut out of evolving architectures. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we unpack what little is known about the Snowflake announcement from Dell Technologies World and discuss the implications of a changing Cloud landscape. We'll also share some new data for Cloud and Database platforms from ETR that shows Snowflake has actually entered the Earth's orbit when it comes to spending momentum on its platform. Now, before we get into the news I want you to listen to Frank's Slootman's answer to my question as to whether or not Snowflake would ever architect the platform to run On-Prem because it's doable technically, here's what he said, play the clip >> Forget it, this will only work in the Public Cloud. Because it's, this is how the utility model works, right. I think everybody is coming through this realization, right? I mean, excuses are running out at this point. You know, we think that it'll, people will come to the Public Cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the Private Cloud. It's not that we can't run a private Cloud. It's just diminishes the potential and the value that we bring. >> So you may be asking yourselves how do you square that circle? Because basically the Dell Snowflake announcement is about bringing Snowflake to the private cloud, right? Or is it let's get into the news and we'll find out. Here's what we know at Dell Technologies World. One of the more buzzy announcements was the, by the way this was a very well attended vet event. I should say about I would say 8,000 people by my estimates. But anyway, one of the more buzzy announcements was Snowflake can now run analytics on Non-native Snowflake data that lives On-prem in a Dell object store Dell's ECS to start with. And eventually it's software defined object store. Here's Snowflake's clark, Snowflake's Clark Patterson describing how it works this past week on theCUBE. Play the clip. The way it works is I can now access Non-native Snowflake data using what materialized views, external tables How does that work? >> Some combination of the, all the above. So we've had in Snowflake, a capability called External Tables, which you refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically there's a through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data, wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud, up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell On-Premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake. So that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> So as Clark explained, this capability of External tables has been around in the Cloud for a while, mainly to suck data out of Cloud data lakes. Snowflake External Tables use file level metadata, for instance, the name of the file and the versioning so that it can be queried in a stage. A stage is just an external location outside of Snowflake. It could be an S3 bucket or an Azure Blob and it's soon will be a Dell object store. And in using this feature, the Dell looks like it lives inside of Snowflake and Clark essentially, he's correct to say to an analyst that looks exactly like the data is in Snowflake, but uh, not exactly the data's read only which means you can't do what are called DML operations. DML stands for Data Manipulation Language and allows for things like inserting data into tables or deleting and modifying existing data. But the data can be queried. However, the performance of those queries to External Tables will almost certainly be slower. Now users can build things like materialized views which are going to speed things up a bit, but at the end of the day, it's going to run faster than the Cloud. And you can be almost certain that's where Snowflake wants it to run, but some organizations can't or won't move data into the Cloud for a variety of reasons, data sovereignty, compliance security policies, culture, you know, whatever. So data can remain in place On-prem, or it can be moved into the Public Cloud with this new announcement. Now, the compute today presumably is going to be done in the Public Cloud. I don't know where else it's going to be done. They really didn't talk about the compute side of things. Remember, one of Snowflake's early innovations was to separate compute from storage. And what that gave them is you could more efficiently scale with unlimited resources when you needed them. And you could shut off the compute when you don't need us. You didn't have to buy, and if you need more storage you didn't have to buy more compute and vice versa. So everybody in the industry has copied that including AWS with Redshift, although as we've reported not as elegantly as Snowflake did. RedShift's more of a storage tiering solution which minimizes the compute required but you can't really shut it off. And there are companies like Vertica with Eon Mode that have enabled this capability to be done On-prem, you know, but of course in that instance you don't have unlimited elastic compute scale on-Prem but with solutions like Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake, you can certainly, you can start to simulate that Cloud elasticity On-prem. I mean, it's not unlimited but it's sort of gets you there. According to a Dell Snowflake joint statement, the companies the quote, the companies will pursue product integrations and joint go to market efforts in the second half of 2022. So that's a little vague and kind of benign. It's not really clear when this is going to be available based on that statement from the two first, but, you know, we're left wondering will Dell develop an On-Prem compute capability and enable queries to run locally maybe as part of an extended apex offering? I mean, we don't know really not sure there's even a market for that but it's probably a good bet that again, Snowflake wants that data to land in the Snowflake data Cloud kind of makes you wonder how this deal came about. You heard Sloop on earlier Snowflake has always been pretty dogmatic about getting data into its native snowflake format to enable the best performance as we talked about but also data sharing and governance. But you could imagine that data architects they're building out their data mesh we've reported on this quite extensively and their data fabric and those visions around that. And they're probably telling Snowflake, Hey if you want to be a strategic partner of ours you're going to have to be more inclusive of our data. That for whatever reason we're not putting in your Cloud. So Snowflake had to kind of hold its nose and capitulate. Now the good news is it further opens up Snowflakes Tam the total available market. It's obviously good marketing posture. And ultimately it provides an on ramp to the Cloud. And we're going to come back to that shortly but let's look a little deeper into what's happening with data platforms and to do that we'll bring in some ETR data. Now, let me just say as companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Pure and others build out their hybrid Clouds. The cold hard fact is not only do they have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model. You will hear them talk about that a lot, but they got to do that. So it, and that's critical from a user experience but in order to gain that flywheel momentum they need to build a robust ecosystem that goes beyond their proprietary portfolios. And, you know, honestly they're really not even in the first inning most companies and for the likes of Snowflake to sort of flip this, they've had to recognize that not everything is moving into the Cloud. Now, let's bring up the next slide. One of the big areas of discussion at Dell Tech World was Apex. That's essentially Dell's nascent as a service offering. Apex is infrastructure as a Service Cloud On-prem and obviously has the vision of connecting to the Cloud and across Clouds and out to the Edge. And it's no secret that database is one of the most important ingredients of infrastructure as a service generally in Cloud Infrastructure specifically. So this chart here shows the ETR data for data platforms inside of Dell accounts. So the beauty of ETR platform is you can cut data a million different ways. So we cut it. We said, okay, give us the Cloud platforms inside Dell accounts, how are they performing? Now, this is a two dimensional graphic. You got net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and what ETR now calls Overlap formally called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. That's on the horizontal axis that red dotted line at 40% represents highly elevated spending on the Y. The table insert shows the raw data for how the dots are positioned. Now, the first call out here is Snowflake. According to ETR quote, after 13 straight surveys of astounding net scores, Snowflake has finally broken the trend with its net score dropping below the 70% mark among all respondents. Now, as you know, net score is measured by asking customers are you adding the platform new? That's the lime green in the bar that's pointing from Snowflake in the graph and or are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the forest green is spending flat that's the gray is you're spend decreasing by 6% or worse. That's the pinkish or are you decommissioning the platform bright red which is essentially zero for Snowflake subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now, what's somewhat interesting is that snowflakes net score overall in the survey is 68 which is still huge, just under 70%, but it's net score inside the Dell account base drops to the low sixties. Nonetheless, this chart tells you why Snowflake it's highly elevated spending momentum combined with an increasing presence in the market over the past two years makes it a perfect initial data platform partner for Dell. Now and in the Ford versus Ferrari dynamic. That's going on between the likes of Dell's apex and HPE GreenLake database deals are going to become increasingly important beyond what we're seeing with this recent Snowflake deal. Now noticed by the way HPE is positioned on this graph with its acquisition of map R which is now part of HPE Ezmeral. But if these companies want to be taken seriously as Cloud players, they need to further expand their database affinity to compete ideally spinning up databases as part of their super Clouds. We'll come back to that that span multiple Clouds and include Edge data platforms. We're a long ways off from that. But look, there's Mongo, there's Couchbase, MariaDB, Cloudera or Redis. All of those should be on the short list in my view and why not Microsoft? And what about Oracle? Look, that's to be continued on maybe as a future topic in a, in a Breaking Analysis but I'll leave you with this. There are a lot of people like John Furrier who believe that Dell is playing with fire in the Snowflake deal because he sees it as a one way ticket to the Cloud. He calls it a one way door sometimes listen to what he said this past week. >> I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah, but that we've talked about this don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers ultimately from VMware. >> Okay, so what does the data say about what John just said? How is VMware actually doing in Cloud after its early missteps and then its subsequent embracing of AWS and other Clouds. Here's that same XY graphic spending momentum on the Y and pervasiveness on the X and the same table insert that plots the dots and the, in the breakdown of Dell's net score granularity. You see that at the bottom of the chart in those colors. So as usual, you see Azure and AWS up and to the right with Google well behind in a distant third, but still in the mix. So very impressive for Microsoft and AWS to have both that market presence in such elevated spending momentum. But the story here in context is that the VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware's On-Prem Cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation VCF they're doing pretty well in the market. Look, at HPE, gaining some traction in Cloud. And remember, you may not think HPE and Dell and VCF are true Cloud but these are customers answering the survey. So their perspective matters more than the purest view. And the bad news is the Dell Cloud is not setting the world on fire from a momentum standpoint on the vertical axis but it's above the line of zero and compared to Dell's overall net score of 20 you could see it's got some work to do. Okay, so overall Dell's got a pretty solid net score to you know, positive 20, as I say their Cloud perception needs to improve. Look, Apex has to be the Dell Cloud brand not Dell reselling VMware. And that requires more maturity of Apex it's feature sets, its selling partners, its compensation models and it's ecosystem. And I think Dell clearly understands that. I think they're pretty open about that. Now this includes partners that go beyond being just sellers has to include more tech offerings in the marketplace. And actually they got to build out a marketplace like Cloud Platform. So they got a lot of work to do there. And look, you've got Oracle coming up. I mean they're actually kind of just below the magic 40% in the line which is pro it's pretty impressive. And we've been telling you for years, you can hate Oracle all you want. You can hate its price, it's closed system all of that it's red stack shore. You can say it's legacy. You can say it's old and outdated, blah, blah, blah. You can say Oracle is irrelevant in trouble. You are dead wrong. When it comes to mission critical workloads. Oracle is the king of the hill. They're a founder led company that knows exactly what it's doing and they're showing Cloud momentum. Okay, the last point is that while Microsoft AWS and Google have major presence as shown on the X axis. VMware and Oracle now have more than a hundred citations in the survey. You can see that on the insert in the right hand, right most column. And IBM had better keep the momentum from last quarter going, or it won't be long before they get passed by Dell and HP in Cloud. So look, John might be right. And I would think Snowflake quietly agrees that this Dell deal is all about access to Dell's customers and their data. So they can Hoover it into the Snowflake Data Cloud but the data right now, anyway doesn't suggest that's happening with VMware. Oh, by the way, we're keeping an eye close eye on NetApp who last September ink, a similar deal to VMware Cloud on AWS to see how that fares. Okay, let's wrap with some closing thoughts on what this deal means. We learned a lot from the Cloud generally in AWS, specifically in two pizza teams, working backwards, customer obsession. We talk about flywheel all the time and we've been talking today about marketplaces. These have all become common parlance and often fundamental narratives within strategic plans investor decks and customer presentations. Cloud ecosystems are different. They take both competition and partnerships to new heights. You know, when I look at Azure service offerings like Apex, GreenLake and similar services and I see the vendor noise or hear the vendor noise that's being made around them. I kind of shake my head and ask, you know which movie were these companies watching last decade? I really wish we would've seen these initiatives start to roll out in 2015, three years before AWS announced Outposts not three years after but Hey, the good news is that not only was Outposts a wake up call for the On-Prem crowd but it's showing how difficult it is to build a platform like Outposts and bring it to On-Premises. I mean, Outpost isn't currently even a rounding era in the marketplace. It really doesn't do much in terms of database support and support of other services. And, you know, it's unclear where that that is going. And I don't think it has much momentum. And so the Hybrid Cloud Vendors they've had time to figure it out. But now it's game on, companies like Dell they're promising a consistent experience between On-Prem into the Cloud, across Clouds and out to the Edge. They call it MultCloud which by the way my view has really been multi-vendor Chuck, Chuck Whitten. Who's the new co-COO of Dell called it Multi-Cloud by default. (laughing) That's really, I think an accurate description of that. I call this new world Super Cloud. To me, it's different than MultiCloud. It's a layer that runs on top of hyperscale infrastructure kind of hides the underlying complexity of the Cloud. It's APIs, it's primitives. And it stretches not only across Clouds but out to the Edge. That's a big vision and that's going to require some seriously intense engineering to build out. It's also going to require partnerships that go beyond the portfolios of companies like Dell like their own proprietary stacks if you will. It's going to have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model and to do that, you're going to need more and more deals like Snowflake and even deeper than Snowflake, not just in database. Sure, you'll need to have a catalog of databases that run in your On-Prem and Hybrid and Super Cloud but also other services that customers can tap. I mean, can you imagine a day when Dell offers and embraces a directly competitive service inside of apex. I have trouble envisioning that, you know not with their historical posture, you think about companies like, you know, Nutanix, you know, or Cisco where they really, you know those relationships cooled quite quickly but you know, look, think about it. That's what AWS does. It offers for instance, Redshift and Snowflake side by side happily and the Redshift guys they probably hate Snowflake. I wouldn't blame them, but the EC Two Folks, they love them. And Adam SloopesKy understands that ISVs like Snowflake are a key part of the Cloud ecosystem. Again, I have a hard time envisioning that occurring with Dell or even HPE, you know maybe less so with HPE, but what does this imply that the Edge will allow companies like Dell to a reach around on the Cloud and somehow create a new type of model that begrudgingly accommodates the Public Cloud but drafts of the new momentum of the Edge, which right now to these companies is kind of mostly telco and retail. It's hard to see that happening. I think it's got to evolve in a more comprehensive and inclusive fashion. What's much more likely is companies like Dell are going to substantially replicate that Cloud Operating Model for the pieces that they own pieces that they control which admittedly are big pieces of the market. But unless they're able to really tap that ecosystem magic they're not going to be able to grow much beyond their existing install bases. You take that lime green we showed you earlier that new adoption metric from ETR as an example, by my estimates, AWS and Azure are capturing new accounts at a rate between three to five times faster than Dell and HPE. And in the more mature US and mere markets it's probably more like 10 X and a major reason is because of the Cloud's robust ecosystem and the optionality and simplicity of transaction that that is bringing to customers. Now, Dell for its part is a hundred billion dollar revenue company. And it has the capability to drive that kind of dynamic. If it can pivot its partner ecosystem mindset from kind of resellers to Cloud services and technology optionality. Okay, that's it for now? Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson is on the production team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and Rob Hof, on editorial they helped get the word out and thanks to Jordan Anderson for the new Breaking Analysis branding and graphics package. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. You could check out ETR website @etr.ai. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You want to get in touch. @dave.vellente @siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante. You can make a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)