Snowflake To Offer Its Data Warehouse Services On Google Cloud

Snowflake Inc. will provide its cloud-native data warehouse services on Google Cloud Platform starting later this year, putting it in a position to better support customers' multi-cloud strategies.

The move completes a trifecta for Snowflake, which has run its expanding portfolio of data management and data warehouse services on Amazon Web Services since 2015 and began support on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform in July 2018.

Snowflake, generally seen as one of the fastest growing IT startups in recent years, also announced this week that its data warehouse services are now available on the Microsoft Azure Government for use by U.S. government agency customers.

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Snowflake, based in San Mateo, Calif., made the announcements at its Snowflake Summit customer conference in San Francisco this week.

"As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, it's become important for businesses to have a unified data source," said Frank Slootman, recently named Snowflake's CEO, in a statement. "We're excited to work with Google Cloud to provide the flexibility, performance and unlimited concurrency that customers require to power their businesses ahead of the competition."

Snowflake's announcement is significant for Google Cloud and its efforts to catch AWS and Microsoft Azure in cloud platform market share. Google Cloud has taken a more aggressive competitive stance since former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian took over as Google Cloud CEO in January.

"Enterprises are undergoing digital transformations, and increasingly their data is informing these shifts," Kurian said in a statement. "Enterprises will soon be able to use Snowflake alongside Google Cloud's comprehensive set of advanced analytics and machine learning solutions."

Snowflake said its data warehousing system will be available on Google Cloud in preview mode this fall with general availability scheduled for early 2020.

The relationship with Google Cloud will be one of "co-opetition" in that while Snowflake's data warehouse services will run on the Google Cloud Platform, it competes with Google's own BigQuery cloud data warehouse services. Snowflake similarly competes with the AWS Redshift cloud data warehouse system, despite Snowflake running its services on the AWS cloud platform.

Snowflake said that McKesson Corp., a major pharmaceutical and medical supply distributor and provider of healthcare technology solutions, plans to use Snowflake's services on Google Cloud to develop new applications and products, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, and enhanced analytics.

Snowflake also announced that its data warehouse services are now available on Microsoft Azure Government, a mission-critical cloud platform that provides cloud security, governance and compliance capabilities required by U.S. government agencies and the vendors they work with.

"With Snowflake on Azure Government, government agencies get the performance, scalability and simplicity of the most powerful cloud-built data warehouse while simultaneously meeting strict government security and compliance requirements," said Ro Dhanda, Snowflake's regional vice president of the U.S. Federal Business, in a statement.

This week's conference and related announcements come just a month after Bob Muglia suddenly stepped down as Snowflake Computing's CEO and was immediately replaced by former ServiceNow CEO Slootman.

Snowflake also announced the Snowflake Data Exchange, an online marketplace where customers can connect with data from other providers via a data catalog and join that data with their own data sets within the Snowflake system. The Data Exchange is currently in private preview and will be more widely available in public preview later this year.