Tyler Prince, Snowflake's global leader of alliances and channels, spoke to CRN about Snowflake's mission to build the world's best AI, app, and expertise partner ecosystem as the AI era heats up.
According to Tyler Pince, the company's channel leader, Snowflake is building the world's best partner ecosystem for AI and applications with a unique approach that only Snowflake can offer.
With the $2.67 billion data cloud superstar's open platform and growing partnerships with AI leaders from Nvidia and Microsoft to AI startups like Reka and Mistral AI, Snowflake helps customers specialize in AI, applications, and services. It has become the #1 spot for your knowledge needs.
“When it comes to generative AI and all the elements of AI, it’s clear that there are tremendous benefits for businesses. But it quickly comes back to being only as good as the data you have,” says Snowflake Alliance. said Prince, the world leader in channels.
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“Our mission to inspire all companies and third parties, from startups to software companies to large enterprises looking to monetize their data, to innovate on our platform is an exciting and fast-growing part of our business. part,” Prince said. “That's one of the reasons I joined him at Snowflake, because I saw the excitement and evolution of the importance of data.”
Prince is a channel veteran with more than 30 years of experience at companies including Oracle and IBM. He worked at Salesforce for 10 years, most recently as Worldwide Vice President of Alliances and Channels, and then in 2023 he joined Snowflake.
Snowflake's revenue reached $2.67 billion in fiscal 2024. Launching new LLM for AI
For fiscal year 2024, which ended January 31, 2024, Snowflake's total product revenue was $2.67 billion, an increase of 38% year over year.
The company currently has approximately 9,500 customers leveraging Snowflake's Data Cloud to share data and build AI and machine learning applications that power their businesses. On the AI innovation front, Snowflake last month announced Arctic, a new large-scale language model (LLM) designed to be the most open, enterprise-grade LLM on the market.
“Our approach to technology is to enable customer choice, which has been very helpful to us,” Prince said. “For example, look at the cloud partners we have. We don't lock customers in. Customers can decide which cloud infrastructure they choose, and Snowflake runs on AWS, Microsoft, or Google. …it builds on Snowflake’s long-standing expertise in effective, controlled, and secure data sharing.”
In an interview with CRN, Prince broke down Snowflake's strategy to own the world's best ecosystem of AI solutions, applications and AI expertise provided by channel partners.
What is Snowflake's strategy to become a world leader in the AI era?
As a company, we have two missions. One is to continue to position ourselves and support our customers with a data cloud platform that helps all areas of data and AI. The second is how do you scale your ecosystem to support customer success?
We are developing a strategy for how to build the world's number one ecosystem of AI, apps, and expertise.
On the AI side, we have some really great things going on with Nvidia, and we also recently announced partnerships with Reka, Mistral AI, and Landing AI. So it's a really exciting time to be at the crossroads of a platform like Snowflake and working with innovative companies. That's the AI part of the ecosystem that matters the most.
The app part is our approach to building an ecosystem of apps and technology and data partners. There is a native app framework. This makes it easy for third parties to innovate and build apps on our platform.
Previously, it was the responsibility of the app builder to build the app and the customer to populate the app with data. This new approach we're pioneering is aimed at building apps that live within your data. Therefore, providers can build applications and deploy them to their customers' data. So on the app side, we're really building this special sauce that Snowflake has cultivated over the years around effective, controlled and secure data sharing.
Our mission to inspire all companies and third parties, from startups to software companies to large enterprises looking to monetize their data, to innovate on our platform is an exciting and fast-growing part of our business. This is the part where you are.
What is Snowflake's strategy to become a leader in AI expertise? Does it revolve around Snowflake's channel partners?
yes. Part of that expertise is working hands-on with system integrators, consulting firms, advisory firms, digital agencies, and resellers to adopt this data cloud platform and enable global customers across all industries to innovate and use our platform. We can help you explore ways to expand.
The theory is that every AI strategy requires a comprehensive data strategy.
That's why we feel perfectly positioned to work with system integrators and market experts who every day help customers find ways to leverage their data platforms to realize the promise of Gen AI.
Over the past six to nine months, nearly every company in every industry and every region of the world has turned to consultancies asking, “What should my Gen AI strategy be?” An ecosystem of partners (these consultancies, system integrators, etc.) responded by doing the work.
For Snowflake and its partners, Gen AI is shaping up to be a great opportunity to help companies ask insightful questions: “How will Gen AI transform my business?” and “What should I do?”
We are very confident that it is a great platform to consider in that transformation and transition to AI.
Want to talk about Snowflake’s new Arctic LLM?
This is exactly the approach we take to provide flexibility to our customers. If you want to innovate from a Gen AI perspective, we have a platform to support you.
However, we are clear that we also rely on partners such as Nvidia and Reka, and that we will continue to work closely with AWS and Microsoft as they have significant investments in these areas. doing.
This shows that we understand that our customers and future customers have many technology decisions to make when embarking on an AI strategy. We also recognize that the winners and losers may not have been determined yet. So we're providing a framework and building an architecture that supports the different options that customers want to approach.
Some people within Snowflake's walls rely heavily on their partners. This is how we think about our openness approach to empowering customers to choose their own path.
What partner incentives, programs, MDF funding, resources, etc. does Snowflake offer channels to take advantage of this AI opportunity?
Some are in the form of MDF funds and we are looking at how we can co-market in the market.
Some companies are offering incentives for helping customers start their Snowflake journey. So we invest in things like proofs of concept and workshops to offset some of the costs for our partners.
We also invest in helping our partners build their capabilities. How can we help them train and get certified and really build their knowledge and expertise around Snowflake? We have programs related to all of these.
We also work closely with AWS, Microsoft, and GCP on platforms. I'd like to focus on AWS and Microsoft in particular. They also provide investments to our system integrators through Snowflake to help them build their capabilities and move their data to the cloud.
So all of this comes together as a powerful way to encourage our partners to take the leap to help our customers succeed.
So, overall, how can Snowflake achieve owning the world's #1 ecosystem of AI, apps, and expertise?
Our approach to technology – empowering customers with choice – has been very helpful to us.
For example, take a look at our cloud partners. We don't lock in customers. Customers can decide which cloud infrastructure they choose, and Snowflake runs on their AWS, Microsoft, or Google.
And while our approach to AI continues to innovate the Cortex AI platform, we also employ and collaborate with some of the most established and innovative LLMs on the market today.
And a lot of it has to do with the success and momentum we're seeing and the fact that we're establishing ourselves as the data platform of choice for many of our customers. It's an open approach to how we support our customers in this expanded ecosystem.
The power is in your hands and we have options that you are comfortable using. We've had the right strategy since the company's inception, and we're reaping the benefits of it as we build this ecosystem.
