Frank Slootman Dave Vellante Cube Conversation
>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around >>the world. This is a cute conversation high, but this is Day Volonte. And as you know, we've been tracking the next generation of clouds. Sometimes we call it Cloud to two point. Frank's Lukman is here to really unpack this with me. Frank. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Yeah, you as well. They could see it >>s o obviously hot off your AIPO A lot of buzz around that. Uh, that's fine. We could we could talk about that, but I really want to talk about the future. What? Before we get off the I p o. That was something you told me when you're CEO service. Now you said, hey, we're priced to perfection, so it looks like snowflakes gonna be priced to perfection. It's a marathon, though. You You made that clear. I presume it's not any different here for you. Yeah, >>well, I think you know the service now. Journey was different in the sense that we were kind of under the underdogs, and people sort of discovered over the years the full potential of the company and I think there's stuff like they pretty much discovered a day. One. It's a little bit more, More sometimes it's nice to be an underdog. Were a bit of an over dog in this, uh, this particular scenario, but, you know, it is what it is, Andre. You know, it's all about execution delivering the results, delivering on our vision, Uh, you know, being great with our customers. And, uh, hopefully the chips will fall where they where they may. At that point, >>yeah, you're you're You're a poorly kept secret at this point, Frank. After a while, I wanted, you know, I've got some excerpts of your book that that I've been reading. And, of course, I've been following your career since the two thousands. You're off sailing. You mentioned in your book that you were kind of retired. You were done, and then you get sucked back in now. Why? I mean, are you in this for the sport? What's the story here? >>Uh, actually, that that's not a bad way of characterizing it. I think I am in that, uh, you know, for the sport, uh, you know the only way to become the best version of yourself is to be to be under the gun and, uh, you know, every single day. And that's that's certainly what we are. It sort of has its own rewards building great products, building great companies, regardless off you know what the spoils. Maybe it has its own rewards. And I It's hard for people like us to get off the field and, you know, hang it up. So here we are. >>You know, you're putting forth this vision now the data cloud, which obviously it's good marketing, but I'm really happy because I don't like the term Enterprise Data Warehouse. I don't think it reflects what you're trying to accomplish. E D. W. It's slow on Lee. A few people really know how to use it. The time value of data is gone by the time you know, your business is moving faster than the data in the D. W. And it really became a savior because of Sarbanes Oxley. That's really what it came a reporting mechanism. So I've never seen What you guys are doing is is e d w. So I want you to talk about the data cloud. I want to get into the to the vision a little bit and maybe challenge you on a couple things so our audience can better understand it. Yes. So >>the notion of a data cloud is is actually, uh, you know, type of cloud that we haven't had. I mean, data has been been fragmented and locked up in a million different places in different clouds. Different cloud regions, obviously on premise, um, And for data science teams, you know, they're trying thio drive analysis across datasets, which is incredibly hard, Which is why you know, a lot of this resorts to, you know, programming on bond things of that sort of. ITT's hardly scalable because the data is not optimized. The economics are not optimized. There's no governance model and so on. But a data cloud is actually the ability thio loosely couple and lightly Federated uh, data, regardless of where it is. So it doesn't have scale limitations or performance limitations. Uh, the way traditional data warehouses have had it. So we really have a fighting chance off really killing the silos and unlocking the bunkers and allowing the full promise of data sciences and ml On day I thio really happen. I mean, a lot of lot of the analysis that happens on data is on the single data set because it's just too damn hard, you know, to drive analysis across multiple data sets. And, you know, when we talk to our customers, they have very precise designs on what they're trying to do. They say, Look, we are trying to discover, you know, through through through deep learning You know what the patterns are that lead to transactions. You know, whether it's if you're streaming company. Maybe it's that you're signing up for a channel or you're buying a movie or whatever it is. What is the pattern you know, of data points that leads us to that desired outcome. Once you have a very accurate description of the data relationships, you know that results in that outcome, you can then search for it and scale it, you know, tens of million times over. That's what digital enterprises do, right? So in order to discover these patterns enriched the data to the point where the patterns become incredibly predictive. Uh, that's that's what snowflake is formed, right? But it requires a completely Federated Data mo because you're not gonna find a data pattern in the in the single data set per se right? So that's that's what it's all about. I mean, the outcomes of a data cloud are very, very closely related to the business outcomes that the user is seeking, right? It's not some infrastructure process. It has a very remote relationship with business outcome. This is very, very closely related. >>So it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at the Trillion Years Club. And so I could see that I could see the big you know, trillion dollars apple $2 trillion market cap companies. They got data at the core, whereas most companies most incumbents. Yeah, it might be a bottling plant that the core, some manufacturing or some other processes they put, they put data around it in these silos. It seems like you're trying toe really? Bring that innovation and put data at the core. And you've got an architecture to do that. You talk about your multi cluster shared storage architecture. You mentioned you mentioned data sharing it. Will this, in your opinion, enable, for instance, incumbents to do what a lot of the startups were able to do with the cloud days? I mean they got access to data centers, which they they couldn't have before the cloud you're trying to do with something similar with data. >>Yeah, so So, you know, obviously there's no doubt that the cloud is a critical enabler. This wouldn't be happening. Uh, you know what? I was at the same time, the trails that have been blessed by the likes of Facebook and Google. Uh, e the reason those enterprises are so extraordinary valuable is is because of what they know. Uh, you know, through data and how they can monetize what they know through data. But that is now because that power is now becoming available, you know, to every single enterprise out there. Right, Because the data platform, the underlying cloud capabilities, we are now delivering that to anybody who wants it. Now, you still need to have strong date engineering data science capabilities. It's not like falling off a log, but fundamentally, those capabilities are now, you know, broadly accessible in the marketplace. >>So we're talking upfront about some of the differences between what you've done earlier in your career. Like I said, you're the worst kept secret, you know, Data domain. I would say it was sort of somewhat of a niche market. You you blew it up until it was very disruptive, but it was somewhat limited in what could be done. Uh, and and maybe some of that limitation, you know, wouldn't have occurred if you stay the price, uh, independent company service. Now you mop the table up because you really had no competition there, Not the case here. You you've got some of the biggest competitors in the world, so talk about that. And what gives you confidence that you can continue to dominate, >>But, you know, it's actually interesting that you bring up these companies. I mean, data. The man was a scenario where we were constrained on market and literally we were a data backup company. As you recall, we needed to move into backup software. Need to move the primary storage. While we knew it, we couldn't execute on it because it took tremendous resource is which, back in the day, it was much harder than one of this right now. So we ended up selling the company to E M. C and and now part of Dell. But way short, uh, we're left with some trauma from that experience, Uh, that, you know, why couldn't we, you know, execute on that transformation? So coming to service now, we were extremely. I'm certainly need personally, extremely attuned to the challenges that we have endured in our prior company. One of the reasons why you saw service now break out at scale at tremendous growth rights is because of what we have learned from the prior journey. We're not gonna ever get caught again in a situation where we could not sustain our markets and sustain our growth. So if service I was very much the execution model was very much a reaction to what we had encountered in the prior company. Now coming into snowflake totally different deal. Because not only is there's a large market, this is a developing market. I think you've pointed out in some of your broadcasting that this market is very much in flux on the reason is that you know, technology is now capable of doing things for for people and enterprises that they could never do before. So people are spending way mawr resource is than they ever thought possible on these new capability. So you can't think in terms of static markets and static data definitions, it means nothing. Okay, These things are so in transition right now, it's very difficult for people you know to to scope that the scale of this opportunity. >>Yeah. I wanna understand you're thinking around and, you know, I've written about the TAM, and can Snowflake grow into its valuation and the way I drew it, I said, Okay, you got data Lakes and you got Enterprise Data Warehouse. That's pretty well understood. But I called it data as a service to cover the closest analogy to your data cloud. And then even beyond that, when you start bringing in the edge and real time data, uh, talk about how you're thinking about that, Tam. And what what you have to do to participate. You have toe, you know, bring adjacent capabilities, ISAT this read data sharing that will get you there. In other words, you're not like a transaction system. You hear people talking about converge databases, you hear? Talk about real time inference at the edge that today anyway, isn't what snowflake is about. Does that vision of data sharing and the data cloud does that allow you to participate in that massive, multi $100 billion tam that that I laid out and probably others as well. >>Yeah, well, it is always difficult. Thio defined markets based on historical concept that probably not gonna apply whole lot for much longer. I mean, the way we think of it is that data is the beating heart of the digital enterprise on, uh, you know, digital enterprises today. What do you look at? People against the car door dash or so on. Um, they were built from the ground up to be digital on the prices and data Is the beating heart off their operation Data operations is their manufacturing, if you will, um, every other enterprise out there is is working very hard to become digital or part digital and is going to learn to develop data platforms like what we're talking about here to data Cloud Azaz. Well, as the expertise in terms of data engineering and data scientist to really fully become a digital enterprise, right. So, you know, we view data as driving operations off the digital enterprise. That's really what it iss right data, and it's completely data driven. And there's no people involved. People are developing and supporting the process. But in the execution, it is end to end. Data driven. Being that data is the is the signal that initiates the process is technol assess. Their there being a detective, and then they fully execute the entire machinery probe Problematic machinery, if you will, um, you know, of the processes that have been designed, for example, you know, I may fit a certain pattern. You know, that that leads to some transactional context. But I've not fully completed that pattern until I click on some Lincoln. And all of a sudden proof I have become, you know, a prime prospect system, the text that in the real time and then unleashes Oh, it's outreach and capabilities to get me to transact me. You and I are experiencing this every day. You know, when we're when we're online, you just may not fully re election. That's what's happening behind the scenes. That's really what this is all about. So and so to me, this is sort of the new online transaction processing is enter and, uh, you know, data digital. Uh, no process that is continually acquiring, analyzing and acting on data. >>Well, you've talked about the time time value of of data. It loses value over time. And to the extent that you can actually affect decisions, maybe before you lose the customer before you lose the patient even even more importantly or before you lose the battle. Uh, there's all kinds of, you know, mental models that you can apply this. So automation is a key part of that. And then again, I think a lot of people like you said, if you just try to look at historical markets, you can't really squint through those and apply them. You really have toe open up your mind and think about the new possibilities. And so I could see your your component of automation. I I see what's happening in the r P. A space and and I could see See these this massive opportunities Thio really change society, change business, your last thoughts. >>There's just there's just no scenario that I can envision where data is not completely core in central to a digital enterprise, period. >>Yeah, I think I really do think, Frank, your your your Your vision is misunderstood somewhat. I think people say Okay. Hey, we'll bet on salute men Scarpelli the team. That's great to do that. But I think this is gonna unfold in a way that people may be having predicted that maybe you guys, yourselves and your founders, you know, haven't have aren't able to predict as well. But you've got that good, strong architectural philosophy that you're pursuing and it just kind of feels right, doesn't it? >>You know, I mean, one of the 100 conversations and, uh, you know, things is the one of the reasons why we also wrote our book. You know, the rights of the data cloud is to convey to the marketplace that this is not an incremental evolution, that this is not sort of building on the past. There is a real step function here on the way to think about it is that typically enterprises and institutions will look at a platform like snowflakes from a workload context. In other words, I have this business. I have this workload. This is very much historically defined, by the way. And then they benchmark us, you know, against what they're what they're already doing on some legacy platform. And they decided, like, Yeah, this is a good fit. We're gonna put Snowflake here. Maybe there, but it's still very workload centric, which means that we are essentially perpetuating the mentality off the past. Right? We were doing it. Wanna work, load of the time We're creating the new silos and the new bunkers of data in the process. And we're really not approaching this with level of vision that the data science is really required to drive maximum benefit from data. So our arguments and this is this is not an easy arguments is to say, toc IOS on any other sea level person that wants to listen to that look, you know, just thinking about, you know, operational context and operational. Excellent. It's like we have toe have a platform that allows us unfettered access to the data that, you know, we may need to, you know, bring the analytical power to right. If you have to bring in political power to a diversity of data sets, how are we going to do that right? The data lives in, like, 500 different places. It's just not possible, right, other than with insane amounts of programming and complexity, and then we don't have the performance, and we don't have to economics, and we don't have the governance and so on. So you really want to set yourself up with a data cloud so that you can unleash your data science, uh, capabilities, your machine learning your deep learning capabilities, aan den, you really get the full throttle advantage. You know of what the technology can do if you're going to perpetuate the silo and bunkering of data by doing it won't work. Load of the time. You know, 5, 10 years from now, we're having the same conversation we've been having over the last 40 years, you know? >>Yeah. Operationalize ing your data is gonna require busting down those those silos, and it's gonna require something like the data cloud to really power that to the next decade and beyond. Frank's movement Thanks so much for coming in. The Cuban helping us do a preview here of what's to come. >>You bet, Dave. Thanks. >>All right. Thank you for watching. Everybody says Dave Volonte for the Cube will see you next time
SUMMARY :
And as you know, we've been tracking the next generation of clouds. Yeah, you as well. Before we get off the I p o. That was something you told me when you're CEO service. this particular scenario, but, you know, it is what it is, Andre. I wanted, you know, I've got some excerpts of your book that that I've been reading. uh, you know, for the sport, uh, you know the only way to become the best version of yourself is to it. The time value of data is gone by the time you know, your business is moving faster than the data is on the single data set because it's just too damn hard, you know, to drive analysis across And so I could see that I could see the big you know, trillion dollars apple Uh, you know, through data and how they can monetize what Uh, and and maybe some of that limitation, you know, wouldn't have occurred if you stay the price, Uh, that, you know, why couldn't we, you know, execute on and the data cloud does that allow you to participate in that massive, And all of a sudden proof I have become, you know, a prime prospect system, Uh, there's all kinds of, you know, mental models that you completely core in central to a digital enterprise, period. maybe you guys, yourselves and your founders, you know, haven't have aren't able to predict as well. You know, I mean, one of the 100 conversations and, uh, you know, things and it's gonna require something like the data cloud to really power that to the next Everybody says Dave Volonte for the Cube will see you next time
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