Snowflake Computing

CEO: Bob Muglia

Snowflake Computing came out of stealth mode in October, debuting the cloud-based data warehousing services it's positioning as a more flexible, easier-to-manage alternative to complex and often very expensive on-premise data warehouse systems. Snowflake's Elastic Data Warehouse, currently in beta, also will be competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services' Redshift and Google's Big Query.

CEO Bob Muglia says the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse service can operate at 90 percent lower cost than on-premise data warehouses, but is easier to use than the AWS and Google competitors. The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup went so far as to develop its own database system that can handle both structured and semi-structured data.