SAN FRANCISCO — Snowflake, which uses names such as Arctic, Snowsight and Snowpark as brands for its products and tools, certainly was a hot commodity this week at its well-attended (estimated 15,000 attendees) Data Cloud Summit, which ended June 6 at the Moscone Center here. It seemed every other data management company in the IT world was making deals and partnerships with the San Mateo, Calif.-based conference host.
Snowflake, one of the hottest cloud-based data storage management providers on the planet, was awash in news items involving companies such as NVIDIA, Informatica, Neo4J, Alation and a score of others.
NVIDIA
For starters, the company unveiled a new collaboration with NVIDIA that enables users to build customized AI data applications in Snowflake, powered by NVIDIA AI. No other type of software development is currently in more enterprise demand than AI-affiliated apps.
In this latest partnership, Snowflake has adopted NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to integrate NeMo Retriever microservices into Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake’s fully managed large language model (LLM) and vector search service. According to Snowflake, this will enable enterprises to more efficiently connect custom models to various business data streams and deliver responses with predictable accuracy. Storage admins generally need all the help they can get when it comes to this task.
In addition, the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, which provides the ability to deploy, run and scale AI inferencing for any application on any platform, will be available in Snowflake Cortex AI. AI inferencing is the process where a trained AI model applies its learned knowledge to new data to make predictions, classifications or decisions. It’s the stage where the AI model demonstrates its practical utility by utilizing the patterns and insights it gained during training.
Finally, Snowflake Arctic, an open, enterprise-grade LLM, is now fully supported with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software, providing users with highly optimized performance, Snowflake said. Arctic recently became available as an NVIDIA NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices — an inference microservice that provides models as optimized containers), allowing more developers to access Arctic’s intelligence bank.
Neo4J
Snowflake picked up a graph database and analytics partner this week. Neo4j announced at the event a partnership with the host company to bring its fully integrated native graph data science solution within Snowflake AI Data Cloud. The integration enables users to execute more than 65 graph algorithms, eliminates the need to move data out of their Snowflake environment, and empowers them to leverage advanced graph capabilities using the SQL programming language, environment, and tooling that they already know.
The new package features an extensive library of graph algorithms to identify anomalies and detect fraud, optimize supply chain routes, unify data records, improve customer service, power recommendation engines and hundreds of other use cases.
“By 2025, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics innovations — up from 10% in 2021 — facilitating rapid decision-making across the enterprise,” Gartner predicted in its Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Data and Analytics 2023 report. “Data and analytics leaders must leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) with the robustness of knowledge graphs for fault-tolerant AI applications,” Gartner wrote.
Informatica
Informatica launched its new generative AI and Snowflake native app offerings on the Snowflake AI data cloud at the Summit. The offerings include:
- Generative AI capabilities supported by Native SQL ELT for Cortex AI functions: With this, Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) customers can incorporate Cortex AI Functions as part of their IDMC no-code data integration and data engineering pipelines running natively on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.
- Enterprise Data Integrator: Integrates Snowflake’s Native App framework for quicker discovery and data loading.
- Cloud Data Access Management (CDAM): delivers policy-based access management, providing a centralized control plane for both data governance and access, while simplifying enterprise-wide data access management.
Carto
Cloud native spatial analysis platform maker Carto announced the beta availability of its full platform as a Snowflake Native App integrated with Snowpark Container Services. Carto says its platform turns spatial data into an efficient delivery route, better behavioral marketing and strategic store placements.
This is significant because geospatial analysis can help organizations solve location-oriented problems and gain new perspectives for decision-making in critical functions, such as climate risk measurement, emergency response and traditional business optimization. Historically, geospatial analysis has taken place in siloes with separate data management, tools and analytical processes. However, integrations such as this democratize access to spatial analysis, enabling organizations to collect data more efficiently, share location-based insights, and inform their scaling strategies, Carto said.
With this integration, Snowflake users can access Carto’s spatial analytics capabilities directly within the Snowflake environment, including geospatial visualization, analysis and app development functionalities.
Alation
Data intelligence software maker Alation revealed an improved integration with Snowflake Horizon to increase data quality and help organizations deliver AI-ready data. Snowflake joins Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative to enable organizations to proactively detect and address data quality issues before they impact business operations. This, Alation said, will facilitate improved governance, accelerate more accurate AI model development, and democratize trusted decision-making across the enterprise.
Snowflake Says It Won’t Offer a Standalone UI Anytime Soon
Snowflake’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, and co-founder and President of Products Benoit Dageville, queried on various topics by media members in a roundtable session on Day 1 of the Summit, said that Snowflake at this time has no current intention to develop a standalone user interface that might benefit smaller enterprises without dev teams. Snowflake’s architecture and extensive APIs support the development of composable data applications and experiences on top of it.
“Our approach is really the iPhone,” Dageville told The New Stack. “As you go through the marketplace, I don’t believe there is one single form of UI that could do everything for everybody. When you are targeting (building) an application, you can really customize Snowflake the way you need to use it. Our set of APIs makes this very possible, and they are easy to use.”
Snowflake enables the creation of composable data solutions by separating storage, compute, and services. This allows developers to independently scale and optimize each layer, providing the flexibility needed for composable solutions. Snowflake offers a comprehensive set of open APIs (REST APIs, Snowpark, etc.) that allow developers to programmatically interact with the platform. These APIs enable Snowflake integration with other tools and the building of custom applications, facilitating composability.
Lastly, Snowflake has a vast partner ecosystem that provides pre-built connectors, applications, and services that integrate with Snowflake. These components can be combined and customized to create composable solutions.
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At its Data Cloud Summit, Snowflake joined forces with companies such as Nvidia, Informatica, Neo4J, Alation and a score of others for an AI extravaganza.