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Partnership Enables Organizations to Create and Deliver Analytics Experiences at Any Scale
SAN MATEO, Calif. – Jan. 26, 2016 – Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, today announced a technology and go-to-market partnership with Looker, the business intelligence platform for data-driven companies, to leverage the cloud and bring powerful, self-service analytic insights at any scale to customers without the complexity and inflexibility of conventional solutions. Building on the native integration between Looker’s business intelligence platform and the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™, this partnership will further extend the ability of Looker users to take advantage of unique Snowflake capabilities, provide easy deployment of Snowflake with Looker and accelerate market adoption.

“Looker makes it easy for business teams to quickly ask and answer their own questions while at the same time maintaining data analysts’ power to curate that data,” said Frank Bien, CEO at Looker. “By combining Snowflake’s unique cloud data warehouse with Looker, business teams and data analysts can curate and explore data at any scale with outstanding performance and flexibility. Working together, Looker and Snowflake deliver a tightly integrated solution for modern data analytics that takes full advantage of the cloud.”

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is a data warehouse as a service, built from the cloud up for today’s data and analytics. Looker’s native integration with Snowflake takes advantage of Snowflake’s unique architecture and capabilities: it enables users to use Snowflake’s elastic scaling to get great performance on any scale of data, take advantage of Snowflake’s native support for structured and semi-structured data to analyze diverse data in one place, and benefit from Snowflake’s automation and self-tuning capabilities to do that without the complexities of manually configuring and tuning the data warehouse. As a result, Looker users can focus on getting insights from their data rather than on managing data infrastructure.

“Our customers are trying to do more with their data, but are suffering from the pain and complexity of doing that with conventional solutions,” said Bob Muglia, CEO at Snowflake. “Looker and Snowflake bring self-service access to data so that analysts can easily explore and analyze all their business data at any scale of data, workloads and users.”

“The combination of Snowflake and Looker gives our business users a powerful, self-service tool to explore diverse data quickly and with ease,” said JP Lester, chief technology officer at The Orchard, a music and film distribution company. “The ability to deploy faster than traditional offerings, analyze structured data together with semi-structured data like JSON in a single system, and easily provide our team with meaningful information at any scale, helps us go from questions to actions in a more efficient manner across the company.”

Snowflake and Looker will be hosting a complimentary webinar featuring customer Sharethrough to discuss how customers are using Snowflake together with Looker on Jan. 28, 2016, at 10 a.m. PST / 1 p.m. EST. For more details and to register, visit https://www.snowflake.com/webinar/discover-sharethrough-their-journey-to-self-service-analytics-in-the-cloud-featuring-snowflake-and-looker.

Tweet this: .@lookerdata and @SnowflakeDB partner to enable self-service data analytics using the #cloud https://bit.ly/1TkyedO

Snowflake Resources

• Website: www.snowflake.com
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/SnowflakeDB
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/snowflake-computing
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowflakecomputing
• Google+: https://goo.gl/WQbQp2
• Snowflake is hiring: https://www.snowflake.com/about/careers

About Looker
Looker is on a mission to bring better insights and data-driven decisions to every level of an enterprise. The company has fast become the catalyst that is bringing data cultures to more than 350 industry-leaders such as Yahoo!, Gilt, Warby Parker, and Sony. Looker is the only analytics tool that allows a data analyst to curate and centralize massive amounts of data – creating a crucial single source of truth – and an easy way for every business team to quickly ask and answer their own questions. Business teams no longer need to work with just subsets of data, while data analysts can focus on more complex analysis instead of a never-ending list of requests from across the company. What results is a data culture where everyone understands what’s working and informed decisions can be made faster and with confidence. Looker integrates with Google BigQuery, Spark, Impala, Hive, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure DW, Teradata Aster, HP Vertica, IBM dashDB, and Snowflake, among others. The company is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London. Investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and PivotNorth. For more information, follow @lookerdata or visit looker.com.

About Snowflake
Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, was founded in 2012 by a team of experts who hold over 120 patents in the fields of database architecture, data warehouses, query optimization and parallelization. Snowflake was created with the vision to reinvent the data warehouse, bringing together all users, all data and all workloads in a single repository. The company is backed by leading investors including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at www.snowflake.com.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287
[email protected]

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KIXEYE Revamps Existing Data Architecture with Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™

Video Gaming Leader Chooses Snowflake Computing for its Scalability and Elasticity, Saving Time and Money

SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 22, 2015 – Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, announced today that KIXEYE, a gaming company focused on mobile and online gaming markets, has deployed the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse™ to optimize its existing data architecture, relieve latency issues and reduce overall infrastructure costs.

KIXEYE develops high-quality, deeply immersive games for a worldwide audience. As a result, data analytics plays a key role at KIXEYE, supporting ongoing experimentation with new features, functionalities and platforms. KIXEYE captures data on millions of game events every few minutes and makes that data available to analysts for data exploration, predictive analytics and reporting. Using data helps KIXEYE make its games fun, interesting and profitable.

KIXEYE’s previous data architecture needed to evolve to meet its needs. It required multiple systems and a significant amount of ETL processing in Hadoop, which resulted in a system that had become overly complex, created significant latency from when data arrived to when analysts could access it, and became too expensive for KIXEYE to support. KIXEYE started looking for a solution that could handle the constant change in its data and do so without significant engineering overhead or operational cost.

KIXEYE deployed the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse to meet its data transformation and processing needs. Snowflake provided a far less complex solution, whose native support for semi-structured JSON data and unique ability to scale up and down on-the-fly to meet its demands, made a compelling combination.

“I can’t say enough about how fantastic the native JSON support is,” said Josh McDonald, director of analytics engineering at KIXEYE. “I’ve never actually seen anything that worked until now. Using SQL, Snowflake lets us load our JSON data as is, flatten it all out, load it into the event tables, and then parse that into views. My analysts are really happy about this.”

KIXEYE is also taking advantage of Snowflake’s elasticity to give each group the resources needed, without breaking the bank. Snowflake provides the ability to have a warehouse sized appropriately for processing all of KIXEYE’s loading of data and internal ETL, where each can happen in parallel so that its marketing, finance and gaming teams can be working at the same time without contention.

“Prior to using Snowflake, it was taking more than two hours from the time data arrived to the time that it was fully queryable. Additionally, we were constantly making sure Hadoop was doing the things that it needed to do and that data was being stored appropriately,” McDonald said. “With Snowflake, we’re now processing upward of one million batches of events every couple of minutes, and only paying for the processing power we’re using – saving a huge amount of money. Even more, I don’t have to be a database administrator, which is something I really like.”

Snowflake was founded to reinvent the data warehouse by a team of data experts from companies including Actian, Amazon, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata, who hold more than 120 patents in databases and data processing. That team developed an all-new data warehouse, built from the ground up for the cloud. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud—at a 90 percent lower cost than on-premises data warehouses.

Tweet This: .@KIXEYE revamps data architecture w/ @SnowflakeDB Elastic Data Warehouse https://ow.ly/PUo6G #datawarehousing

Resources

Website: www.snowflake.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/SnowflakeDB

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/snowflake-computing

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowflakecomputing

Google+: https://goo.gl/WQbQp2

Snowflake is hiring: https://www.snowflake.com/about/careers/

About KIXEYE

Founded in 2007, KIXEYE is a mobile and online gaming company that is redefining the intersection of fidelity and accessibility to create innovative experiences for competitive gamers. KIXEYE currently has over 300 employees based in its San Francisco headquarters, along with international offices in Brisbane, Australia, and Victoria, Canada, and is responsible for popular titles VEGA Conflict, Battle Pirates, War Commander, and Backyard Monsters.

About Snowflake

Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, has reinvented the data warehouse for the cloud and today’s data. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is built from the cloud up with a patent-pending new architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The company is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at snowflake.net.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287

[email protected]

General availability of new release brings enterprise-class data warehousing and new innovations to any scale of data, workload and users

SAN MATEO, Calif. – June 23, 2015 – Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, today announced the general availability of the Snowflake Elastic Data WarehouseTM, the first data warehouse designed from the start for the cloud. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse has a unique architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

The rapid adoption of cloud infrastructure and software services is driving a tectonic shift in enterprise IT. That shift is causing organizations to reexamine their data warehousing technology, seeking solutions that are more than just conventional software repackaged in the cloud. By developing a completely new data warehouse specifically for the cloud, Snowflake not only makes enterprise-class data warehousing available with the rapid deployment and elasticity of the cloud, but also delivers new innovations in performance, scalability and ease of use that go beyond the limits of today’s data warehouses and big data platforms.

“The cloud has changed the game in data warehousing,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. “However, simply ‘cloud-washing’ a conventional data warehouse misses that opportunity. Organizations want to get more value from their data, not simply bring their current challenges into the cloud, or worse, create problems by deploying complex solutions that force them to retrain their staff and abandon existing tools and processes. From day one, Snowflake has had a singular focus on reinventing the data warehouse, building from the cloud up to solve the data analysis needs of customers.”

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is an all-new SQL data warehouse delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the cloud. Snowflake’s patent-pending architecture breaks from convention by centralizing data in low-cost, scalable cloud storage, while allowing diverse users and workloads to run concurrently without performance degradation. Snowflake handles the infrastructure, availability, security and optimization so that users can focus on what matters to them – loading and querying their data.

This release delivers key innovations including:

• Native support and optimization for diverse data. Snowflake supports both traditional structured data and machine-generated, semi-structured data in a single database engine, without requiring transformation and without sacrificing performance or flexibility.
• Multi-dimensional elasticity. Snowflake can scale data, workloads and users up and down in minutes, without downtime or disruption and without impacting performance.
• Self-tuning service. Snowflake adaptively manages and tunes data distribution, data storage, metadata and query execution based on actual workloads, without knobs or manual tuning.
• Extreme data and service availability. Snowflake’s data warehousing service is fully distributed and resilient across multiple data centers at all layers. Data is stored in fully replicated storage and can be recovered instantly using Snowflake’s Time Travel feature.
• Enterprise-class security. Secure authentication, granular access control and industrial-grade encryption for both data in-flight and on disk are provided as always-on features for all customers.

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was created by a team of industry veterans that holds over 120 patents and has decades of experience in databases and data processing at companies including Actian, Cloudera, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata.

In a separate announcement today, Snowflake also disclosed $45 million in new funding from leading venture capital firms Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.

Availability

The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse was introduced in October 2014 and is generally available immediately. For more information, contact Snowflake at [email protected].

Tweet This

The @SnowflakeDB Elastic Data Warehouse, the first #datawarehouse built from the ground up, is now generally available: [LINK]

Resources

• Website: www.snowflake.com
  Twitter: www.twitter.com/SnowflakeDB
  LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/snowflake-computing
  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowflakecomputing
  Google+: https://goo.gl/WQbQp2
  Snowflake is hiring: https://www.snowflake.com/about/careers/

Supporting Quotes

“Using Snowflake, we’ve been able to simplify our data pipeline, keep more data available for analysis, and do all of that significantly faster and cheaper than our previous on-premises solution. Snowflake just works, allowing us to take people and money that would otherwise be spent on care and feeding of the data warehouse and instead focusing them on developing new analytics.”

– Britt Crawford, VP analytics & asset management, Rafter

“The decoupling of compute and storage, the simplicity of SaaS and the pay-for-what-you-consume model made it easy to choose Snowflake compared to any of the legacy alternatives we considered.”

– Ananth Reddy, SVP & CTO, MyPoints

“We chose Snowflake to help power the web performance reporting and analytics that we provide our customers because it differentiated itself from the alternatives. Snowflake is awesomely fast, allows us to store data at a low cost and deploy exactly the compute capacity needed, and does all of that without requiring tuning or tweaking.“

– Matt Solnit, founder and VP of engineering, SOASTA

“Snowflake’s novel design gives us great performance without the complexity of traditional data warehousing. The native support for semi-structured JSON data, the flexibility to scale up or down at any time, and the strong SQL support allow our team to bypass most of the steps in building a traditional data warehouse so that they can focus on analyzing data instead.”

– Seth Strumph, CTO, DealBase

About Snowflake

Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, has reinvented the data warehouse for the cloud and today’s data. The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse is built from the cloud up with a patent-pending new architecture that delivers the power of data warehousing, the flexibility of big data platforms and the elasticity of the cloud – at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. The company is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at snowflake.net.

Media Contact
Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287
[email protected]

• 70 percent are increasing their investments in data warehousing
• 96 percent do not see Hadoop as a replacement to their existing data warehouse
• Almost one third are already using cloud data warehouses

SAN MATEO, Calif. – March 30, 2015 – Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, announced today the results of an independent, national survey of more than 315 technology and analytics professionals with responsibility for corporate data initiatives. Conducted by Dimensional Research, the goal of the research was to understand the state of the data warehouse and Big Data initiatives – including experiences, challenges and trends in data warehousing and data analytics.

“The State of the Data Warehouse” research findings indicate that data warehousing is still viewed as a critical business component, in spite of its challenges. An overwhelming majority of data professionals characterize their data warehouse as very important for business operations (72 percent), and expect an increasing level of investment in data warehousing at their organization (70 percent). However, 97 percent of respondents stated major challenges when it comes to data warehousing.

Despite these challenges, Hadoop is not viewed as a practical replacement for the data warehouse. A majority of data professionals (64 percent) would not consider Hadoop as a possible replacement for any portion of their data warehouse. In fact, 91 percent expressed concerns about using Hadoop, with 71 percent citing lack of specialized expertise as a key concern.

In addition, interest in Big Data is high but still in its early stages. The study showed that while 70 percent of respondents were interested in a Big Data initiative, only five percent of respondents actually had a fully deployed initiative and just 11 percent are in pilot.

“Hype has created confusion about what is really happening with Big Data initiatives,” said Diane Hagglund, principal at Dimensional Research. “Although interest in Big Data is high, this study found that most organizations still have not implemented Big Data initiatives. Further, this study found that Big Data initiatives and Hadoop have not diminished the importance of the data warehouse–data warehousing remains critically important and will not be replaced by Hadoop.”

Summary of key survey findings:

Data warehouses are still critically important

• 99 percent of respondents say their data warehouse is important to business operations
• 70 percent are increasing their investment in data warehousing
• 97 percent face challenges with their current data warehousing solutions

Big Data initiatives and Hadoop have not replaced the data warehouse

• 91 percent have considered a Big Data investment
• Yet only 11 percent have a pilot in place, and only five percent have fully deployed their Big Data initiative
• 96 percent say Hadoop will not replace their existing data warehouse
• Just 12 percent have easy access to Hadoop expertise (by contrast, 93 percent have easy access to SQL expertise)

Cloud-based data warehousing is desirable, especially for data already in the cloud

• 93 percent see value in the potential benefits of cloud data warehousing
• 32 percent have a cloud-based data warehouse today
• 79 percent of those with data in the cloud bring it into the data warehouse, although only nine percent bring all data in

“Although the Big Data buzz has led to speculation about the future of data warehousing, this survey confirms that the ‘death of the data warehouse’ has been greatly exaggerated,” said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. “The data warehouse remains critically important, but as this survey shows the market has a critical need for a modern data warehouse, one designed to take advantage of the cloud and eliminate the complexity of current solutions, without requiring scarce new skills and expertise.”

To access the full Dimensional Research survey report on “The State of the Data Warehouse,” go to: https://info.snowflake.net/StateOfTheDataWarehouse.html

Survey Methodology and Participant Demographics

In February 2015, technology and analytics stakeholders with responsibility for corporate data initiatives were invited to participate in an online survey on the topic of data analytics and warehousing. Participants were asked a series of questions about their role in data initiatives, as well as specific questions on experiences, challenges and trends with data warehousing, Big Data, Hadoop and cloud computing. A total of 319 individuals with professional responsibility for data initiatives completed the survey. Participants represented a wide range of geographies, company sizes, role and vertical industries. All participants worked at companies that used data warehousing.

Tweet This: New market research by @DimensionalResearch reveals continued demand for #datawarehousing but small investments in #bigdata https://ow.ly/KX3fq

Resources

• Website: www.snowflake.com
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/SnowflakeDB
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/snowflake-computing
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowflakecomputing
• Google+: https://goo.gl/WQbQp2
• Snowflake is hiring: https://careers.snowflake.com/

About Dimensional Research

Dimensional Research® provides practical market research to help technology companies make their customers more successful. Researchers are experts in the people, processes and technology of corporate IT and understand how corporate IT organizations operate. We partner with our clients to deliver actionable information that reduces risks, increases customer satisfaction and grows the business. For more information, visit www.dimensionalresearch.com.

About Snowflake

Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing company, was founded in 2012 by a team of experts who hold over 120 patents in the fields of database architecture, data warehouses, query optimization and parallelization. Snowflake was created with the vision to reinvent the data warehouse, bringing together all users, all data and all workloads in a single repository. The company is backed by leading investors including Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Snowflake is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be found online at www.snowflake.com.

Media Contact

Danielle Salvato-Earl
Kulesa Faul for Snowflake Computing
(650) 922-7287
[email protected]