Snowflake Is Building World’s ‘No. 1 AI, Apps And Expertise’ Ecosystem, Says Global Partner Leader

Tyler Prince, Snowflake’s worldwide leader of Alliances and Channel, explains to CRN Snowflake’s mission to create the best AI, app and expertise partner ecosystem in the world as the AI era heats up.

Snowflake is assembling the world’s best partner ecosystem for AI and applications with a unique approach that only Snowflake can provide, according to the company’s channel leader Tyler Prince.

The $2.67 billion data cloud superstar’s open platform and expanding partnerships with AI leaders—from Nvidia and Microsoft to AI startups such as Reka and Mistral AI—is making Snowflake the No. 1 spot for customers’ AI, applications, and service expertise needs.

“Clearly, there’s tremendous business benefit around generative AI and all the elements of AI. But it quickly comes back to, it’s only as good as the data that you have,” said Prince, Snowflake’s worldwide leader of alliances and channels.

“The mission of inspiring companies or third parties to innovate on our platform— everything from startups, to software companies, to large enterprises looking to monetize their data—that’s an exciting, fast-growing part of our business,” Prince said. “That’s one of the reasons why I joined Snowflake, because I saw the excitement and the evolution towards the importance of data.”

Prince is a channel veteran with over 30 years of experience working in top roles at the likes of Oracle and IBM. He spent a decade at Salesforce, most recently as executive vice president of worldwide Alliances and Channels, before joining Snowflake in 2023.

Snowflake Sales Hit $2.67 Billion In FY24; Launch New LLM For AI

For fiscal year 2024, which ended Jan. 31, 2024, Snowflake generated $2.67 billion in total product revenue, representing an increase of 38 percent year over year.

The company currently has nearly 9,500 customers who leverage Snowflake’s Data Cloud to share data, build AI and machine learning applications that power their business. On the AI innovation front, Snowflake last month launched Arctic, its new large language model (LLM) designed to be the most open, enterprise-grade LLM on the market.

“Our approach to our technologies in allowing customers’ choice is something that has served us well,” Prince said. “Look at the cloud partners we have, for example. There’s no lock-in for our customers. Customers can decide what their preferred cloud infrastructure of choice is and Snowflake will run on AWS, Microsoft or Google. … It really builds upon this special sauce that Snowflake has had over the years around effective, governed, and secure data sharing.”

In an interview with CRN, Prince breaks down Snowflake’s strategy of owning the world’s best ecosystem for AI solutions, applications and AI expertise provided by its channel partners.

What is Snowflake’s strategy to becoming a world leader in the AI era?

We have two missions as a company: one is to make sure we continue to position ourselves and support our customers with a Data Cloud platform to help in all things data and AI. Number two, is how do we expand our ecosystem to support helping our customers be successful.

We have this strategy around, how do we assemble the world’s number one ecosystem for AI, apps and expertise.

The AI part is: we have pretty cool things going on with Nvidia, we also announced partnerships recently with Reka, Mistral AI, Landing AI— so it’s really an exciting time to be at the intersection of a platform like Snowflake, and the opportunity to work with some innovative companies out there, as well. That’s the AI part of the number one ecosystem.

The apps part is: our approach toward building out an ecosystem of apps and tech and data partners. We have a native app framework. So making it easier for third parties to innovate on our platform and build apps.

Historically, app builders built the apps, and it was up to the customers to get the data into the apps. This new approach that we’re pioneering is all about building apps that are in the data. So providers can build applications and deploy it in the data of the customers. So on the apps side, we’re really building upon this special sauce that Snowflake has had over the years around effective, governed, and secure data sharing.

The mission of inspiring companies or third parties to innovate on our platform—everything from startups, to software companies, to large enterprises looking to monetize their data—that’s an exciting, fast growing part of our business.

What is Snowflake’s strategy to being a leader in AI expertise? Does that revolve around Snowflake’s channel partners?

Yes. That expertise part is really working with system integrators, consulting firms, advisory firms, digital agencies, and resellers to embrace this data cloud platform and help customers all around the world across every industry, look for ways to innovate and expand on our platform.

We have this theory that every AI strategy requires a comprehensive data strategy.

So we feel like we’re perfectly positioned with our system integrators, our experts in the marketplace, who are helping our customers every day figured out how to leverage that data platform to deliver on the promises of Gen AI.

Over the last six or nine months, pretty much every company, in every industry, in every part of the world has turned to a consultancy asking, ‘What should my Gen AI strategy be?’ The ecosystem of partners—these consultancies, system integrators, etc.—responded by doing the work.

Gen AI is turning into an incredible opportunity for Snowflake and our partners to help companies that are asking insightful questions about, ‘How does Gen AI transform my business?’ and then, ‘How do I do that?’

We feel very confident that we’re a great platform to be considered for that transformation and the journey to AI.

Talk about Snowflake’s new Arctic LLM?

This is really an approach to provide flexibility to our customers. If you want to innovate from a from a Gen AI perspective, we’ve got a platform to support you.

But we’re super clear in recognizing that we’re also going to depend on partners as well, like Nvidia and Reka, as well as continue to work closely with AWS and Microsoft, as they make significant investments in those areas.

It’s an indication to our customers and our future customers that we understand there’s a lot of technology decisions to be made as they embark on their AI strategy. We also recognize that maybe the winners and losers haven’t shaken out yet. So we are providing a framework and building out an architecture that will support a variety of options that a customer may want to approach.

Some within the walls of Snowflake and others are very dependent on our partners as well. This is our idea of an openness approach to allow customers to choose their path.

What partner incentives, programs, MDF funds, resources, etc. is Snowflake providing to the channel to take advantage of this AI opportunity?

Some are in the form of MDF funds where we're looking at how do we co-market together out in the marketplace?

Some are in incentives around helping customers get started on their Snowflake journey. So investing in proof of concepts or workshops and things like that to help offset some of the partners costs.

Then also investing in helping our partners build their capabilities. How do we help them train and earn certifications and really build out their knowledge and expertise around Snowflake. We have programs around all of those.

We also work very closely across AWS, Microsoft and GCP in terms of our platform. I would call out AWS and Microsoft specifically, they are also investing in and making investments available through Snowflake to our system integrators to help them build their capabilities and this journey of moving data to the cloud.

So all of that comes together as a robust way of incenting partners to take that leap in helping their customers be successful.

So overall, how can Snowflake achieve owning the world’s No. 1 ecosystem of AI, apps and expertise?

Our approach to our technologies in allowing customers’ choice is something has served us well.

Look at the cloud partners we have, for example. There’s no lock-in for our customers. Customers can decide what their preferred cloud infrastructure of choice is and Snowflake will run on AWS, Microsoft or Google.

Also, our approach to AI, we continue to innovate on our Cortex AI platform, but we’re also embracing and working with some of the most established and innovative LLMs in the marketplace today.

Also, a lot of this has to do with the success and momentum we’re seeing and the fact we’ve established ourselves as the data platform of choice for many customers. This open approach to how we want to support our customers with this expanded ecosystem.

The power is in the hands of the customer and we’re ready to have options that they’re comfortable with. We’ve had the right strategy since the beginning of the company, and we’re benefiting from that as we build out this ecosystem.