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Bob Muglia's Snowflake Seeks To Reinvent The Data Warehouse

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This article is more than 8 years old.

A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought leaders Changing the Business Landscape:  Bob Muglia, CEO, Snowflake.  

Data warehouses are traditionally extremely expensive and a huge undertaking for businesses, not to mention the architecture hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. They weren’t built to handle processing the type or quantity of data that is widely collected today.  Bob Muglia hopes to change all that.

He’s the CEO of a startup company called Snowflake Computing.  Snowflake is competing with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and IBM in offering complex data warehouse systems in the cloud as a service. The founders of the company are mostly all ex-senior Oracle database engineers who have spent two years in stealth mode building a brand new relational database from the ground up to fit the needs specific to the cloud.

If Bob Muglia’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he had a high-profile career at Microsoft, rising to be the president of Server and Tools, a $17 billion a year operation and one of Microsoft’s three most profitable businesses.

“I was at Microsoft for 23 years. I joined in ’88 and I left in September of 2011. I was the first technical guy for SQL Server in 1988. And then I rapidly transitioned into operating systems and was involved in the creation of Windows NT,” says Muglia. He took on a variety of roles at the company, including running the tools group, the server group and spent a few years running Office.

He even had more than one run-in with the ever-volatile Steve Ballmer and lived to tell the tale. “When Microsoft was transitioning to P&L’s, I had been having some challenges with Steve at the time. I was the logical guy at that time to run the MSN P&L as he created it. But that didn’t happen,” says Muglia.  In 2001, he went from running a group with 3,000 people working for him to a staff of one to start up the enterprise storage group. While most people leave an organization after such an incident, Muglia used the demotion to fuel his desire to grow the storage group.

“It was one of my great learnings (while at Microsoft) and one of the better transitions that ever happened to me. In many cases people don’t stay at companies when those things happen, but I learned a lot from it,” says Muglia.  From there he grew the enterprise storage group and then picked up Windows server and tools. For his last seven years at Microsoft, he was president of server and tools.

“Microsoft had its challenges and certainly working directly for Steve has its challenges. Steve and I didn’t always see eye to eye on things,” says Muglia.  He eventually left Microsoft in September 2011 and spent a few years at Juniper, which then had its own business challenges.

“I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career shepherding the decline of a legacy business. Instead I wanted to build something that mattered,” says Muglia.

He wanted to find a SaaS company that was doing something broad and impactful. He got connected to Mike Speiser at Sutter Hill Ventures who was the partner that led the Series A funding at Snowflake. “Sutter has this really cool model which I don’t think anyone else has in the valley. They take one of their partners who works with technical founders and they collectively build a company. The partner acts as the initial CEO and does that job for about two years, about the period of time through Series B. The partner then finds a professional to come in and run the company.  That’s the point where someone like me can really add value,” says Muglia.

“I joined last year and it has been the most fun I’ve had since 1993 when we were building Windows NT. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a product that is as disruptive and significant to the industry as Snowflake,” continues Muglia.

Muglia says Snowflake is 50 to 100 times faster at handling data than Hadoop because of the way they’ve designed their system. And they do it in a way that is simple for the customer to use. It doesn’t require special skills because, as a SaaS offering, you don’t have anything to set up. “You literally just load the data and begin running queries,” says Muglia.

“It’s a transformational experience when people work with the technology that’s been built with Snowflake. And we’re seeing it in the traction we’re getting in the market. We just announced general availability in June, but we’re seeing tremendous customer response,” says Muglia.

Muglia feels the company is solving a problem that is so important from a business perspective and of key importance to CIOs and even CEOs of major companies because they need to be working with data and making decisions based on data to be competitive in today’s world.

“It’s a C-suite level issue and the solutions that exist today to solve the problems are complex and hard, and Snowflake is a complete game changer. And that’s why I’m so excited to be here,” says Muglia.

Muglia grew up a Midwesterner in Michigan and went to the University of Michigan back in the early ‘80s. Out of college he joined ROLM, a telecommunications company in Santa Clara, California.  While ROLM had built a better PBX system then the slower moving AT&T at the time, they ran into issues recognizing revenue because of the challenges of shipping software. “Life is full of lessons and with ROLM one of the things I learned is that it’s just as hard to do something that doesn’t matter as it is to do something that really does matter, “says Muglia.  “So why not focus on the things that matter?”

“That was an incredible lesson and it was really a big part of what brought me to Microsoft in 1988,” says Muglia. Back then the PC was the emerging technology and really interesting things were happening in that space and Microsoft was the mover and shaker. “I was very fortunate in my career to work closely with Steve (Ballmer) and Bill (Gates) and many other great people at Microsoft and be able to work on some really transformative things from Windows NT, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Office in the relatively early days,” says Muglia.

As for the future of Snowflake? Since Muglia took over the leadership, the company went from 34 to a little over 80 employees today and is growing fast.

“We think we can be a significant company, potentially a public company. We’re still a ways from really thinking about that. We know the market is such that it can support a major new entrant and we believe the technology is disruptive in a way that will put us in a good position to do that. There’s a lot of execution between here and there. My job is to make sure we do that execution correctly,” concludes Muglia.

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