 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's three-day coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We have been here, as I said, for three days. Dave, we have had an amazing three days. The energy, the momentum, the number of people here, still here, speaks volumes for- I was just saying that the, look back, you know, theCUBE, when it started, early days, was a big part of the Hadoop ecosystem. You know, Cloudera kind of got it started, the whole big data movement. It was awesome energy. You know, and that whole ecosystem has been, I think, just hoovered into the Snowflake ecosystem. They've taken over as the data company, the data cloud. I mean, that was Cloudera, it could have been Cloudera, and now it's, they didn't, they missed it. You know, it was a variety of factors, but Snowflake has nailed it. And now it's theirs to lose. Benoit talked about that on our previous segment, how they, he knew that technically, Hadoop was too complex and was going to fail, and they didn't know it was going to do this. They were going to turn their company into what we see here, but the event itself, Lee says, you know, almost 10,000 people, the right people, people are doing business. We've had a number of people tell us that they're booking deals. That's why people come to face-to-face shows, right? That's the criticism of virtual, ah, it takes too long to close business. Sales people want to be belly-to-belly. And this is a belly-to-belly show. It absolutely is, when you and I were trying to get into the keynote on Tuesday, we finally got in standing room only, multiple overflow rooms, and we're even hearing that still, this is day four of the summit for them, there are still cues to get into breakout sessions, the momentum, but the appetite for this flywheel and what they're creating, but also, they're involving this massively growing ecosystem in its evolution. That synergy was really very much heard and echoed throughout pretty much all of our segments the last couple of days. Yeah, it was amazing, actually. So we like to, we want to be in the front row in the keynotes, we're taking notes, we always do that. You know, sometimes we listen remotely, but when you listen remotely, you miss some things. When you're there, you can see the executives, you can feel their energy, you can chit chat to them on the side, you know, be seen, whatever. And it was crazy. We couldn't get in. So we had to do our thing and, you know, sneak our way in and, you know, hey, we're in media. Oh yeah, come on in. And then, no, they were taking us to a breakout room. We had a sneak in the side door. Got like the last two seats, you know, and, wow. I'm glad we were in there because it gave us a better sense. You know, when you're in the remote watching rooms, you just can't get a sense of the energy. That's why I like to be there. I know you do too. And then to your point about ecosystem. So we've said many times that this is, what Snowflake is developing is what we call a super cloud. It's not just a SAS. It's not just a cloud database. It's a new layer that they're creating. And so what are the attributes of that layer? Well, it hides the underlying complexity of the underlying primitives of the cloud. We've said that ad nauseam. It adds new value on top. Well, what's that value that they're adding? Well, they're adding value of being able to share data, collaborate, have data that's governed and secure globally. And now the other hallmark of a cloud company is ecosystem. And so they're building that ecosystem much more rapidly than we saw at ServiceNow, which is Slutman's previous company. And the key to me is they've launched an application development platform, essentially a super pass, so that you can develop applications on top of the data cloud. And we're hearing tons about monetization. Duh, you could actually make money with data. You can package data into data products and data services or feed data products and services and actually sell that in a cloud, in a super cloud. That's exactly what's happening here. So that's critical. I think my one question mark, if I had to lay one out, is the other hallmark of a cloud is startup. Startups come into that cloud. And so, and I think we're seeing that, maybe not at the pace that AWS did. It's a little different. Snowflake are, they're whale hunters. They have to big companies. But it looks to me like they're relying on the ecosystem to be the startup innovators. That's the important thing about cloud. Cloud brings scale. It definitely brings lower cost because you're eliminating all this undifferentiated labor. But it also brings innovation through startups. So, unlike AWS, who sold the startups directly and started built businesses on AWS, by paying AWS, it's a little bit indirect, but it's actually happening. Where startups in the ecosystem are building products on the data cloud and that ultimately is going to drive value for customers and money for Snowflake and ultimately AWS and Google and Azure. The other thing I would say is the criticism or concern that the cost of goods sold for cloud are going to be so high that it's going to force people to come back on prem. I think that's, I think it's a step in the wrong direction. I think cloud and the cloud operating model is here to stay. I think it's going to be very difficult to replicate that on prem. I don't think you can do cloud without cloud. We'll see what the edge brings. Curious what your thoughts are. You know, we were just at Dell Technologies World a month or so ago when the big announcement, the Snowflake partnership there, cloud native companies recognizing, ah, there's still a lot of data that lives on prem. Given that and everything that we've heard the last couple of days, what are your thoughts around that and their partnerships there? So Dell is, I think finally, now maybe they weren't publicly talking like this, but certainly their marketing was defensive. But the last year or so, Dell has really embraced cloud, not just the cloud operating model. Dell has said, look, we can build value on top of all these hyperscalers. And we saw some examples of Dell Tech World of them stepping their toe into SuperCloud, Project Alpine is an example, and there are others. And then of course the Snowflake deal where Snowflake and Dell got together. I asked Frank Slutman how that deal came about. And I said, did the customer get me in a headlock? I presume that was the case. The customer said, you got to do this or we're not going to do business with you. He said, well, no, not really. Michael and I had a chat, you know, and that's how it started, which was my other, you know, scenario. And that's exactly what happened, I guess. The point being that those worlds are coming together. And so what it means for Dell is as they embrace cloud, as they develop SuperCloud capabilities, they're going to do a lot of business. And Dell for sure knows how to sell, they know how to execute. What I would be doing if I were Dell is I would be trying to substantially replicate what's happening in the cloud on-prem, with on-prem data. So what happens with that Snowflake deal is it's read-only data, you bring, you know, read the data into the cloud, the compute is in the cloud. I should ask Terry this, Terry, I mean Benoit. Can there be an architecture on-prem? We've seen it, Vertica has one. It's called Vertica Eon, where you separate compute from storage. It doesn't have unlimited elasticity, but you can grow compute and storage independently and have a lot more. With Dell doing Apex on-demand, it's cloud-like, they could begin to develop a little mini data cloud or a big data cloud within on-prem that connects to the public cloud. So what Snowflake is missing, a big part of their TAM that they're missing is the on-prem. The Dell and PureDeals are, you know, forays into that, but this on-prem is massive. And Dell is the on-prem poster child. So I think, again, what it means for them is they've got to continue to embrace it. They've got to do more in software, more in data management. They've got to push on Apex. And I'd say the same thing for HPE. I think they're both well behind this in terms of ecosystems, and they're not even close. But they have to start, and they've got to start somewhere, and they've got resources to make it happen. You said in your breaking analysis that you published just a few days ago before the event that Snowflake plans to create a de facto standard in data platforms. What we heard from our guests on this program, your main stage session with Frank Slutman. Still think that? I do. I think it more than I believed it coming in. And the reason I called it that is because, you know, I'm a super fan of Jean-Marc Degani and her data mesh, and what her vision is, kind of the immaculate conception where she wants everything to be open, open standards, and those don't exist today. And I think she perfectly realizes the practicality of de facto standards are going to get to market and add value sooner than open standards. Now open standards over time, and I'll come back to that may occur, but that's clear to me what Snowflake is creating is the de facto standard for data platforms, the data cloud, the super cloud. And what's most impressive, I think really important is they're layering applications now on top of that. The metric to me, and I don't know if we can even count this, but VMware used to use it. For every dollar spent on VMware license, $15 was spent in the ecosystem. It started at, you know, one to one and a half, one to two, one to 10, one to 15. I think it went up to one to 30 at the max. I don't know how they counted that, but it's countable. You know, reasonable people can make estimates like that. And I think as the ecosystem grows, what Snowflake's doing is it's in many respects modeling the cloud, what's the cloud as? Cloud as ecosystems, we talked about startups, and the cloud also has optionality. And optionality means open source. So what you saw with Apache iceberg is we're going to extend to open technologies. What you saw with hybrid tables is we're going to extend to new workloads like transactions. The other thing about Snowflake that's really impressive is you're seeing the vertical focus, financial services, healthcare, retail, media and entertainment. It's very rare for a company of, you know, in this tenure, they're only 10 years old, to really start going vertical with their go-to-market and building expertise around that. I think what's going to happen is the GSIs are going to come in, they love to eat at the trough. The trough here is maybe not big enough for them yet, but it will be. And they're going to start to align with the GSIs and they're going to do really well within those industries, connecting people, collaborating with data. I think it's a killer strategy, but they're executing on it. Right, and we heard a lot of great customer stories from all of those four verticals that you talked about and then some, that that direction and that pivot from a customer perspective, from a sales and marketing perspective is all aligned. And that was kind of one of the themes as well that Frank talked about in his keynote is mission alignment, mission alignment with customers, but also with the ecosystem. And I feel that I heard that with every customer conversation, with every partner conversation and Sniflake conversation that we had over the last, I think 36 segments, Dave. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's the power of many versus the resources of one. And even though, you know, Sniflake tell you they have $5 billion in cash and assets on the balance sheet. And that's fine. That's nothing compared to what an ecosystem has. And Amazon's part of that ecosystem. Azure's part of that ecosystem. Google is part of that ecosystem. Those companies have huge resources. And Sniflake it seems has figured out how to tap those resources and build value on top of it. I think, you know, to me, they're doing a better job than a lot of the database, you know, cloud databases out there. Not necessarily, they don't necessarily have a better database. In fact, I could argue that their database is less functional. And I would argue that actually in many cases. Their database is less functional if you just want a database. But if you want a data cloud and an ecosystem and develop applications on top of that and to be able to monetize, and that's unique. And that is a moat that they're building that is highly differentiable from, and being able to do that relatively easily. I mean, I think they overstate the simplicity with which that is being done. We talked to some customers who said, you know, he didn't say same wine, new bottle. I did ask him that and he said, you know, about Hadoop complexity. And he said, you know, no, it's not that bad, but there's still, you still gotta put this stuff together. And I think in the early parts of a market that are immature, people get really excited because it's so much easier than what was previous. So my other question is, okay, what's somebody working on now that's looking at what Snowflake's doing and saying, I can improve on that. And what's going to be really interesting to see is, can they improve on it in a way and can they raise enough capital such that they can disrupt or Snowflake going to keep, you know, staying paranoid. They got good leaders and keep executing. And I think the other wildcard is edge. You know, Snowflake doesn't really have an edge strategy right now. I think they will develop one. Through the ecosystem. And I don't think they're missing the boat. And I'll do, they'll do it through the ecosystem. Exactly. I don't think they're missing the boat. I think they're just like, well, we don't know what to do today. It's all distributed data and it's ephemeral and they're not, nobody's storing the data. You know, anything that comes back to the cloud, we get. And so, but new architectures are emerging on the edge that are going to bring new economics. There's new silicon. You see what's happening with Apple and the M1, the M1 Ultra and the new systems that they've just developed. What Tesla is doing with custom silicon and amazing things and programmability of the ARM model. So, you know, it's early days, but semiconductors are the mainspring of innovation in this industry without chips. You know, you had nothing. And so, and when you get innovations in silicon, it drives innovations in software because developers go, wow, I can do that now. I can do things in parallel. I can do things faster. I can do things more simply and programmable at scale. So that's happening and that's going to bring a new set of economics in that will, the premise is that it will eventually bleed into the data center. It will, it always does. And I guess the other thing is every 15 years or so, the world gets disrupted, the tech world. We're about 15, 16 years in now to the cloud. So at this point, everybody's like, wow, this is insurmountable. This is the, this is all we'll ever see. Everything that's ever been invented. You know, this is the model of the future. We know that's not the case. I don't know how it's going to get disrupted, but I think edge is going to be part of that. It could be public policy. Governments could come in and, you know, take big tech on, seems like chair con wants to do that. So, so that's what makes this industry so fun. Never a dull moment, Dave. This has been a great three days hosting this show with you. We've uncovered a lot. Your breaking analysis was great to get me prepared for the show. If you haven't seen it, check it out on siliconangle.com. Thanks, Dave. Appreciate all of your insight. I give you some great pleasure working with you. Always good to work with you. Awesome. Great job. Likewise. Great job to the team. Yes. Guys, thank you. Awesome production team. They've kept us going for three days. Kristen and Cheryl and everybody back at the office. Exactly. It takes a village. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We're wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 from Vegas. Thanks for watching, guys. We'll see you soon.