>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave ante. >>When Frank sluman took service, now public many people undervalued the company, positioning it as just a better help desk tool. You know, it turns out that the firm actually had a massive Tam expansion opportunity in it. SM customer service, HR, logistics, security marketing, and service management. Generally now stock price followed over the years, the stellar execution under Slootman and CFO, Mike scar Kelly's leadership. Now, when they took the reins at snowflake expectations were already set that they'd repeat the feet, but this time, if anything, the company was overvalued out of the gate, the thing is people didn't really better understand the market opportunity this time around, other than that, it was a bet on Salman's track record of execution and on data, pretty good bets, but folks really didn't appreciate that snowflake. Wasn't just a better data warehouse that it was building what they call a data cloud, and we've turned a data super cloud. >>Hello and welcome to this. Week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis, we'll do four things. First. We're gonna review the recent narrative and concerns about snowflake and its value. Second, we're gonna share survey data from ETR that will confirm precisely what the company's CFO has been telling anyone who will listen. And third, we're gonna share our view of what snowflake is building IE, trying to become the defacto standard data platform, and four convey our expectations for the upcoming snowflake summit. Next week at Caesar's palace in Las Vegas, Snowflake's most recent quarterly results they've been well covered and well documented. It basically hit its targets, which for snowflake investors was bad news wall street piled on expressing concerns about Snowflake's consumption, pricing model, slowing growth rates, lack of profitability and valuation. Given the, given the current macro market conditions, the stock dropped below its IPO offering price, which you couldn't touch on day one, by the way, as the stock opened well above that and, and certainly closed well above that price of one 20 and folks express concerns about some pretty massive insider selling throughout 2021 and early 2022, all this caused the stock price to drop quite substantially. >>And today it's down around 63% or more year to date, but the only real substantive change in the company's business is that some of its largest consumer facing companies, while still growing dialed back, their consumption this past quarter, the tone of the call was I wouldn't say contentious the earnings call, but Scarelli, I think was getting somewhat annoyed with the implication from some analyst questions that something is fundamentally wrong with Snowflake's business. So let's unpack this a bit first. I wanna talk about the consumption pricing on the earnings call. One of the analysts asked if snowflake would consider more of a subscription based model so that they could better weather such fluctuations and demand before the analyst could even finish the question, CFO Scarelli emphatically interrupted and said, no, <laugh> the analyst might as well have asked, Hey Mike, have you ever considered changing your pricing model and screwing your customers the same way most legacy SaaS companies lock their customers in? >>So you could squeeze more revenue out of them and make my forecasting life a little bit easier. <laugh> consumption pricing is one of the things that makes a company like snowflake so attractive because customers is especially large customers facing fluctuating demand can dial and their end demand can dial down usage for certain workloads that are maybe not yet revenue producing or critical. Now let's jump to insider trading. There were a lot of insider selling going on last year and into 2022 now, I mean a lot sloop and Scarelli Christine Kleinman. Mike SP several board members. They sold stock worth, you know, many, many hundreds of millions of dollars or, or more at prices in the two hundreds and three hundreds and even four hundreds. You remember the company at one point was valued at a hundred billion dollars, surpassing the value of service now, which is this stupid at this point in the company's tenure and the insider's cost basis was very often in the single digit. >>So on the one hand, I can't blame them. You know what a gift the market gave them last year. Now also famed investor, Peter Linsey famously said, insiders sell for many reasons, but they only buy for one. But I have to say there wasn't a lot of insider buying of the stock when it was in the three hundreds and above. And so yeah, this pattern is something to watch our insiders buying. Now, I'm not sure we'll keep watching snowflake. It's pretty generous with stock based compensation and insiders still own plenty of stock. So, you know, maybe not, but we'll see in future disclosures, but the bottom line is Snowflake's business. Hasn't dramatically changed with the exception of these large consumer facing companies. Now, another analyst pointed out that companies like snap, he pointed to company snap, Peloton, Netflix, and face Facebook have been cutting back. >>And Scarelli said, and what was a bit of a surprise to me? Well, I'm not gonna name the customers, but it's not the ones you mentioned. So I, I thought I would've, you know, if I were the analyst I would've follow up with, how about Walmart target visa, Amex, Expedia price line, or Uber? Any of those Mike? I, I doubt he would've answered me anything. Anyway, the one thing that Scarelli did do is update Snowflake's fiscal year 2029 outlook to emphasize the long term opportunity that the company sees. This chart shows a financial snapshot of Snowflake's current business using a combination of quarterly and full year numbers in a model of what the business will look like. According to Scarelli in Dave ante with a little bit of judgment in 2029. So this is essentially based on the company's framework. Snowflake this year will surpass 2 billion in revenues and targeting 10 billion by 2029. >>Its current growth rate is 84% and its target is 30% in the out years, which is pretty impressive. Gross margins are gonna tick up a bit, but remember Snowflake's cost a good sold they're dominated by its cloud cost. So it's got a governor. There has to pay AWS Azure and Google for its infrastructure. But high seventies is a, is a good target. It's not like the historical Microsoft, you know, 80, 90% gross margin. Not that Microsoft is there anymore, but, but snowflake, you know, was gonna be limited by how far it can, how much it can push gross margin because of that factor. It's got a tiny operating margin today and it's targeting 20% in 2029. So that would be 2 billion. And you would certainly expect it's operating leverage in the out years to enable much, much, much lower SGNA than the current 54%. I'm guessing R and D's gonna stay healthy, you know, coming in at 15% or so. >>But the real interesting number to watch is free cash flow, 16% this year for the full fiscal year growing to 25% by 2029. So 2.5 billion in free cash flow in the out years, which I believe is up from previous Scarelli forecast in that 10, you know, out year view 2029 view and expect the net revenue retention, the NRR, it's gonna moderate. It's gonna come down, but it's still gonna be well over a hundred percent. We pegged it at 130% based on some of Mike's guidance. Now today, snowflake and every other stock is well off this morning. The company had a 40 billion value would drop well below that midday, but let's stick with the 40 billion on this, this sad Friday on the stock market, we'll go to 40 billion and who knows what the stock is gonna be valued in 2029? No idea, but let's say between 40 and 200 billion and look, it could get even ugly in the market as interest rates rise. >>And if inflation stays high, you know, until we get a Paul Voker like action, which is gonna be painful from the fed share, you know, let's hope we don't have a repeat of the long drawn out 1970s stagflation, but that is a concern among investors. We're gonna try to keep it positive here and we'll do a little sensitivity analysis of snowflake based on Scarelli and Ante's 2029 projections. What we've done here is we've calculated in this chart. Today's current valuation at about 40 billion and run a CAGR through 2029 with our estimates of valuation at that time. So if it stays at 40 billion valuation, can you imagine snowflake grow into a 10 billion company with no increase in valuation by the end, by by 2029 fiscal 2029, that would be a major bummer and investors would get a, a 0% return at 50 billion, 4% Kager 60 billion, 7%. >>Kegar now 7% market return is historically not bad relative to say the S and P 500, but with that kind of revenue and profitability growth projected by snowflake combined with inflation, that would again be a, a kind of a buzzkill for investors. The picture at 75 billion valuation, isn't much brighter, but it picks up at, at a hundred billion, even with inflation that should outperform the market. And as you get to 200 billion, which would track by the way, revenue growth, you get a 30% plus return, which would be pretty good. Could snowflake beat these projections. Absolutely. Could the market perform at the optimistic end of the spectrum? Sure. It could. It could outperform these levels. Could it not perform at these levels? You bet, but hopefully this gives a little context and framework to what Scarelli was talking about and his framework, not with notwithstanding the market's unpredictability you're you're on your own. >>There. I can't help snowflake looks like it's going to continue either way in amazing run compared to other software companies historically, and whether that's reflected in the stock price. Again, I, I, I can't predict, okay. Let's look at some ETR survey data, which aligns really well with what snowflake is telling the street. This chart shows the breakdown of Snowflake's net score and net score. Remember is ETS proprietary methodology that measures the percent of customers in their survey that are adding the platform new. That's the lime green at 19% existing snowflake customers that are ex spending 6% or more on the platform relative to last year. That's the forest green that's 55%. That's a big number flat spend. That's the gray at 21% decreasing spending. That's the pinkish at 5% and churning that's the red only 1% or, or moving off the platform, tiny, tiny churn, subtract the red from the greens and you get a net score that, that, that nets out to 68%. >>That's an, a very impressive net score by ETR standards. But it's down from the highs of the seventies and mid eighties, where high seventies and mid eighties, where snowflake has been since January of 2019 note that this survey of 1500 or so organizations includes 155 snowflake customers. What was really interesting is when we cut the data by industry sector, two of Snowflake's most important verticals, our finance and healthcare, both of those sectors are holding a net score in the ETR survey at its historic range. 83%. Hasn't really moved off that, you know, 80% plus number really encouraging, but retail consumer showed a dramatic decline. This past survey from 73% in the previous quarter down to 54%, 54% in just three months time. So this data aligns almost perfectly with what CFO Scarelli has been telling the street. So I give a lot of credibility to that narrative. >>Now here's a time series chart for the net score and the provision in the data set, meaning how penetrated snowflake is in the survey. Again, net score measures, spending velocity and a specific platform and provision measures the presence in the data set. You can see the steep downward trend in net score this past quarter. Now for context note, the red dotted line on the vertical axis at 40%, that's a bit of a magic number. Anything above that is best in class in our view, snowflake still a well, well above that line, but the April survey as we reported on May 7th in quite a bit of detail shows a meaningful break in the snowflake trend as shown by ETRS call out on the bottom line. You can see a steady rise in the survey, which is a proxy for Snowflake's overall market penetration. So steadily moving up and up. >>Here's a bit of a different view on that data bringing in some of Snowflake's peers and other data platforms. This XY graph shows net score on the vertical axis and provision on the horizontal with the red dotted line. At 40%, you can see from the ETR callouts again, that snowflake while declining in net score still holds the highest net score in the survey. So of course the highest data platforms while the spending velocity on AWS and Microsoft, uh, data platforms, outperforms that have, uh, sorry, while they're spending velocity on snowflake outperforms, that of AWS and, and Microsoft data platforms, those two are still well above the 40% line with a stronger market presence in the category. That's impressive because of their size. And you can see Google cloud and Mongo DB right around the 40% line. Now we reported on Mongo last week and discussed the commentary on consumption models. >>And we referenced Ray Lenchos what we thought was, was quite thoughtful research, uh, that rewarded Mongo DB for its forecasting transparency and, and accuracy and, and less likelihood of facing consumption headwinds. And, and I'll reiterate what I said last week, that snowflake, while seeing demand fluctuations this past quarter from those large customers is, is not like a data lake where you're just gonna shove data in and figure it out later, no schema on, right. Just throw it into the pond. That's gonna be more discretionary and you can turn that stuff off. More likely. Now you, you bring data into the snowflake data cloud with the intent of driving insights, which leads to actions, which leads to value creation. And as snowflake adds capabilities and expands its platform features and innovations and its ecosystem more and more data products are gonna be developed in the snowflake data cloud and by data products. >>We mean products and services that are conceived by business users. And that can be directly monetized, not just via analytics, but through governed data sharing and direct monetization. Here's a picture of that opportunity as we see it, this is our spin on our snowflake total available market chart that we've published many, many times. The key point here goes back to our opening statements. The snowflake data cloud is evolving well beyond just being a simpler and easier to use and more elastic cloud database snowflake is building what we often refer to as a super cloud. That is an abstraction layer that companies that, that comprises rich features and leverages the underlying primitives and APIs of the cloud providers, but hides all that complexity and adds new value beyond that infrastructure that value is seen in the left example in terms of compressed cycle time, snowflake often uses the example of pharmaceutical companies compressing time to discover a drug by years. >>Great example, there are many others this, and, and then through organic development and ecosystem expansion, snowflake will accelerate feature delivery. Snowflake's data cloud vision is not about vertically integrating all the functionality into its platform. Rather it's about creating a platform and delivering secure governed and facile and powerful analytics and data sharing capabilities to its customers, partners in a broad ecosystem so they can create additional value. On top of that ecosystem is how snowflake fills the gaps in its platform by building the best cloud data platform in the world, in terms of collaboration, security, governance, developer, friendliness, machine intelligence, etcetera, snowflake believes and plans to create a defacto standard. In our view in data platforms, get your data into the data cloud and all these native capabilities will be available to you. Now, is that a walled garden? Some might say it is. It's an interesting question and <laugh>, it's a moving target. >>It's definitely proprietary in the sense that snowflake is building something that is highly differentiatable and is building a moat around it. But the more open snowflake can make its platform. The more open source it uses, the more developer friendly and the great greater likelihood people will gravitate toward snowflake. Now, my new friend Tani, she's the creator of the data mesh concept. She might bristle at this narrative in favor, a more open source version of what snowflake is trying to build, but practically speaking, I think she'd recognize that we're a long ways off from that. And I also think that the benefits of a platform that despite requiring data to be inside of the data cloud can distribute data globally, enable facile governed, and computational data sharing, and to a large degree be a self-service platform for data, product builders. So this is how we see snow, the snowflake data cloud vision evolving question is edge part of that vision on the right hand side. >>Well, again, we think that is going to be a future challenge where the ecosystem is gonna have to come to play to fill those gaps. If snowflake can tap the edge, it'll bring even more clarity as to how it can expand into what we believe is a massive 200 billion Tam. Okay, let's close on next. Week's snowflake summit in Las Vegas. The cube is very excited to be there. I'll be hosting with Lisa Martin and we'll have Frank son as well as Christian Kleinman and several other snowflake experts. Analysts are gonna be there, uh, customers. And we're gonna have a number of ecosystem partners on as well. Here's what we'll be looking for. At least some of the things, evidence that our view of Snowflake's data cloud is actually taking shape and evolving in the way that we showed on the previous chart, where we also wanna figure out where snowflake is with it. >>Streamlet acquisition. Remember streamlet is a data science play and an expansion into data, bricks, territory, data, bricks, and snowflake have been going at it for a while. Streamlet brings an open source Python library and machine learning and kind of developer friendly data science environment. We also expect to hear some discussion, hopefully a lot of discussion about developers. Snowflake has a dedicated developer conference in November. So we expect to hear more about that and how it's gonna be leveraging further leveraging snow park, which it has previously announced, including a public preview of programming for unstructured data and data monetization along the lines of what we suggested earlier that is building data products that have the bells and whistles of native snowflake and can be directly monetized by Snowflake's customers. Snowflake's already announced a new workload this past week in security, and we'll be watching for others. >>And finally, what's happening in the all important ecosystem. One of the things we noted when we covered service now, cause we use service now as, as an example because Frank Lupin and Mike Scarelli and others, you know, DNA were there and they're improving on that service. Now in his post IPO, early adult years had a very slow pace. In our view was often one of our criticism of ecosystem development, you know, ServiceNow. They had some niche SI uh, like cloud Sherpa, and eventually the big guys came in and, and, and began to really lean in. And you had some other innovators kind of circling the mothership, some smaller companies, but generally we see sluman emphasizing the ecosystem growth much, much more than with this previous company. And that is a fundamental requirement in our view of any cloud or modern cloud company now to paraphrase the crazy man, Steve bomber developers, developers, developers, cause he screamed it and ranted and ran around the stage and was sweating <laugh> ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem equals optionality for developers and that's what they want. >>And that's how we see the current and future state of snowflake. Thanks today. If you're in Vegas next week, please stop by and say hello with the cube. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan, who sometimes helps research breaking analysis topics. Alex, my is, and OS Myerson is on production. And today Andrew Frick, Sarah hiney, Steven Conti Anderson hill Chuck all and the entire team in Palo Alto, including Christian. Sorry, didn't mean to forget you Christian writer, of course, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they helped get the word out. And Rob ho is our E IIC over at Silicon angle. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcast, wherever you listen to search breaking analysis podcast, I publish each week on wikibon.com and Silicon angle.com. You can email me directly anytime David dot Valante Silicon angle.com. If you got something interesting, I'll respond. If not, I won't or DM me@deteorcommentonmylinkedinpostsandpleasedocheckoutetr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for the insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next week. I hope if not, we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.