Snowflake Grows 32% on Analytics and AI but Competition Intensifies

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into Snowflake’s
record-breaking Q2 performance and explore how CEO Sridhar
Ramaswamy is positioning the company for long-term AI-driven
success.


Highlights


00:14 — Snowflake has been a remarkable story of
growth and achievement—category creation here around the AI Data
Cloud—and it reported last week a very strong Q2 with product
revenue up 32% to $1.09 billion. That’s the first time it has
topped $1 billion. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the
competition is really intensifying.


01:16 — CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said, “We’re also
trying to continue to push out new AI solutions and technology as
rapidly as possible.” There are startups and similarly sized
companies, such as Databricks and Palantir, coming after it in
that core market. But also bigger players (SAP, Oracle,
Microsoft, Google Cloud, and others) are getting more deeply into
this AI Data Cloud space.


02:06 — Ramaswamy feels that Snowflake is very
well positioned around this end-to-end data lifecycle spot that
it has. He has been repeating relentlessly over the 18 months
he’s been CEO that businesses cannot have a successful AI
strategy unless they first have a successful data strategy and
are able to execute on that data very, very forcefully and
consistently.


03:30 — I mentioned Palantir, talked about them
some last week—and the phenomenal Q1 it had. It grew 48%. So I
really applaud Snowflake for 32% growth. But here’s Palantir in a
similar space—analytics and AI—growing 48%, which is a 50% higher
growth rate than what Snowflake just posted. Databricks is
growing very rapidly as well, doing some good things.


03:54 — Lots of competition there, but—as always
in the Cloud Wars—the biggest winners are always, always the
customers. Later, we'll have a long, detailed article on Cloud
Wars about Snowflake’s Q2 results, perspectives from Ramaswamy,
and some of my own thoughts about how this all shapes out.


Visit Cloud Wars for more.