 Okay, we're back here in theCUBE, focusing on the business promise of the cloud, democratizing data, making it accessible and enabling everyone to get value from analytics, insights, and data. We're now moving into the ecosystem segment, the power of many versus the resources of one, and we're pleased to welcome Barb Hulskamp, who's the Senior Vice President, Partners in Alliances at Altrix, and the special guest, Tarek DeWeek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake. Folks, welcome, good to see you. Thank you, thanks for having me. Good to see you, Dave. Great to see you guys. So cloud migration, it's one of the hottest topics. It's the top, one of the top initiatives of senior technology leaders. We have survey data with our partner, ETR. It's number two behind security and just ahead of analytics. So we're hovering around all the hot topics here. Barb, what are you seeing with respect to customer, cloud migration momentum and how does the Altrix partner strategy fit? Yeah, sure, partners are central company strategy. They always have been. We recognize that our partners have deep customer relationships. And when you connect that with their domain expertise, they're really helping customers on their cloud and business transformation journey. We've been helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with our partner community for quite some time, and our partner base has been growing an average of 30% year over year. That partner community and strategy now addresses several kinds of partner spanning, solution providers to global SIs and technology partners such as Snowflake. And together, we help our customers realize the business promise of their journey to the cloud. Snowflake provides a scalable storage system. Altrix provides the business user friendly front end. So for example, IT departments depend on Snowflake to consolidate data across systems into one data cloud. With Altrix, business users can easily unlock that data in Snowflake solving real business outcomes. Our GSI and solution provider partners are instrumental in providing that end-to-end benefit of a modern analytics stack in the cloud, providing platform guidance, deployment support and other professional services. Great, let's get a little bit more into the relationship between Altrix and Snowflake, the partnership, maybe a little bit about the history. What are the critical aspects that we should really focus on? Barb, maybe you could start and then Tara kindly weigh in as well. Yeah, so the relationship started in 2020 and Altrix made a big battle deep with Snowflake co-innovating and optimizing cloud use cases. Together, we are supporting customers who are looking for that modern analytics stack to replace an old one or to implement their first analytics strategy. And our joint customers want to self-serve with data-driven analytics leveraging all the benefits of the cloud, scalability, accessibility, governance and optimizing their costs. Altrix proudly achieves Snowflake's highest elite tier in their partner program last year. And to do that, we completed a rigorous third-party testing process which also helped us make some recommended improvements to our joint stack. We wanted customers to have confidence. They would benefit from high quality and performance in their investment with us. Then to help customers get the most value out of this joint solution, we developed two great assets. One is the Altrix starter kit for Snowflake and we co-authored a joint best practices guide. The starter kit contains documentation, business workflows and videos helping customers to get going more easily with an Altrix and Snowflake solution. And the best practices guide is more of a technical document bringing together experiences and guidance on how Altrix and Snowflake can be deployed together. Internally, we also built a full enablement catalog of resources. We wanted to provide our account executives more about the value of the Snowflake relationship, how to engage and some best practices. And now we have hundreds of joint customers such as Juniper and Sainsbury who are actively using our joint solution solving big business problems much faster. Cool. Tara, can you give us your perspective on the partnership? Yeah, definitely Dave. So as Bart mentioned, we've got this long-standing, very successful partnership going back years with hundreds of happy joint customers. And when I look at the beginning, Altrix has helped pioneer the concept of self-service analytics, with use cases that we work down with for data prep for BI users like Tableau. And as Altrix has evolved to now becoming from data prep to now becoming a full end to end data science platform, it's really opened up a lot more opportunities for a partnership. Altrix has invested heavily over the last two years in areas of deep integration for customers to fully be able to expand their investment in both technologies. And those investments include things like in database push down, right? So customers can leverage that elastic platform that being the Snowflake data cloud with Altrix orchestrating the end-to-end machine learning workflows. Altrix also invested heavily in Snowpark, a feature we released last year around this concept of data programmability. So all users regardless of their business analysts regardless of their data scientists can use their tools of choice in order to consume and get at data. And now with Altrix cloud, we think it's going to open up even more opportunities. It's going to be a big year for the partnership. Yeah, so you know, Tarek, we've covered Snowflake pretty extensively and you initially solved what I used to call the, I still call the snake swallowing the basketball problem and cloud data warehouse changed all that because you had virtually infinite resources. But so that's obviously one of the problems that you guys solved early on but what are some of the common challenges or patterns or trends that you see with Snowflake customers and where does Altrix come in? Sure, Dave, there's a handful that I can come up with today that are big challenges or trends for us and Altrix really helps us across all of them. There are three particular ones I'm going to talk about. The first one being self-service analytics. If we think about it, every organization is trying to democratize data. Every organization wants to empower all their users, business users, the technology users, but the business users, right? I think every organization has realized that if everyone has access to data and everyone can do something with data, it's going to make them competitively, give them a competitive advantage. With Altrix, it's sort of like we share that vision of putting that power in the hands of everyday users regardless of the skill sets. So with self-service analytics, with Altrix designer, they've started out with self-service analytics as the forefront. And we're just scratching the surface. I think there was an analyst report that shows that less than 20% of organizations are truly getting self-service analytics to their end users. Now with Altrix going to Altrix Cloud, we think that's going to be a huge opportunity for us. And then that opens up the second challenge, which is machine learning and AI. Every organization is trying to get predictive analytics into every application that they have in order to be competitive. And with Altrix creating this platform so they can cater to both the everyday business user, the quote unquote citizen data scientist, and making it code friendly for data scientists to be able to get at their notebooks and all the different tools that they want to use, they fully integrated in our Snowpark platform, which I talked about before. So that now we get an end-to-end solution catering to all lines of business. And then finally, this concept of data marketplaces. We created Snowflake from the ground up to be able to solve the data sharing problem, the big data problem, the data sharing problem. And Altrix, if we look at mobilizing your data, getting access to third party data sets to enrich with your own data sets to enrich with your suppliers and with your partner's data sets, that's what all customers are trying to do in order to get a more comprehensive 360 view within their data applications. And so with Altrix, Altrix is we're working on third party data sets and marketplaces for quite some time. Now we're working on how do we integrate what Altrix is providing with the Snowflake data marketplace so that we can enrich these workflows, these great, great workflows that Altrix ready provides. Now we can add third party data into that workflow. So that opens up a ton of opportunities, Dave. So those are three I see easily that we're going to be able to solve a lot of customer challenges with. Excellent, thank you for that, Tarek. So let's stay on cloud a little bit. I mean, Altrix is undergoing a major transformation, big focus on the cloud. How does this cloud launch impact the partnership, Tarek, from Snowflake's perspective? And then Barb, maybe please add some color. Yeah, sure, Dave. Snowflake started as a cloud data platform. We saw, our founders really saw the challenges that customers were having with becoming data driven. And the biggest challenge was the complexity of having to manage infrastructure to even be able to get applications off the ground. And so we created Snowflake to be cloud data. We created to be a SaaS managed service. So now that Altrix is moving into the same model, right? A cloud platform, a SaaS managed service, we're just removing more of the friction. So we're going to be able to start to package these end-to-end solutions that are SaaS-based, that are fully managed so customers can go faster. They don't have to worry about all of the underlying complexities of stretching things together, right? So that's what's exciting from my viewpoint. Yeah, and I'll follow up. So as you said, we're investing heavily in the cloud. A year ago, we had two pre-desktop products and today we have four cloud products. With cloud, we can provide our users with more flexibility. We want to make it easier for the users to leverage their Snowflake data in the Altrix platform, whether they're using our beloved on-premise solution or the new cloud products. We're committed to that continued investment in the cloud, enabling our joint partner solutions to meet customer requirements wherever they store their data. And with working with Snowflake, we're doing just that. So as customers look for a modern analytic stack, they expect that data to be easily accessible, right? Within a fast, secure and scalable platform. And the launch of our cloud strategy is a huge leap forward in making Altrix more widely accessible to all users in all types of roles. Our GSI and our solution provider partners have asked for these cloud capabilities at scale and they're excited to better support our customers' cloud and analytic ambitions. Bob, how about your go-to-market strategy? How would you describe your joint go-to-market strategy with Snowflake? Sure, it's simple. We've got to work backwards from our customers' challenges, right? Driving transformation to solve problems, gain agencies or help them save money. So whether it's with Snowflake or other GSI's, other partner types, we've outlined a joint journey together from recruit, solution development, activation, enablement, and then strengthening our go-to-market strategies to optimize our results together. We launched an updated partner program and within that framework, we've created new benefits for our partners around opportunity registration, new role-based enablement and training, basically extending everything we do internally for our own go-to-market teams to our partners. We're offering partner marketing resources and funding to reach new customers together. And as a matter of fact, we recently launched a fantastic video with Snowflake, I love this video, that very simply describes the path to insight starting with your Snowflake data, right? We do joint customer webinars, we're working on joint hands-on labs and have a wonderful landing page with a lot of assets for our customers. Once we have an interested customer, we engage our respective account managers, collaborating through discovery questions, proof of concepts, really showcasing the desired outcome. And when you combine that with our partner's technology or domain expertise, it's quite powerful. Tariq, how do you see it, your go-to-market strategy? Yeah, Dave, we've, so we initially started selling, we initially sold Snowflake as technology, right? Looking at positioning the architectural differentiators and the scale and concurrency. And we noticed as we got up into the larger enterprise customers, we're starting to see how do they solve their business problems using the technology, as well as them coming to us and saying, look, we wanna also know how to continue to map back to the specific prescriptive business problems we're having. And so we shifted to an industry focus last year. And this is an area where Altrix has been mature for probably since their inception selling to the line of business, right? Having prescriptive use cases that are particular to an industry like financial services, like retail, like healthcare and life sciences. And so Barb talked about these starter kits where it's prescriptive, you've got a demo and a way that customers can get off the ground and running, right? Cause we wanna be able to shrink that time to market, that time to value that customers can launch these applications. And we wanna be able to tell them specifically how we can map back to their business initiatives. So I see a huge opportunity to align on these industry solutions. As Barb mentioned, we're ready doing that where we've released a few around financial services, we're working on healthcare and retail as well. So that is going to be a way for us to allow customers to go even faster and start to map to lines of business with Altrix. Right, thanks, Tarek. Barb, what can we expect if we're observing this relationship, what should we look for in the coming year? A lot, specifically with Snowflake, we'll continue to invest in the partnership. We're co-innovators in this journey, including Snowpark Extensibility Efforts, which Tarek will tell you more about shortly. We're also launching these great news strategic solution blueprints and extending that at no charge to our partners. With Snowflake, we're already collaborating with their retail and CPG team for industry blueprints. We're working with their data marketplace team to highlight solutions working with that data in their marketplace. More broadly, as I mentioned, we're relaunching the Altrix Partner Program, designed to really better support the unique partner types in our global ecosystem, introducing new benefits so that with every partner achievement or investment with Altrix, we're providing our partners with earlier access to benefits. I could talk about our program for 30 minutes. I know we don't have that kind of time, but the key message here, Altrix is investing in our partner community across the business, recognizing the incredible value that they bring to our customers every day. Great, Tarek, we'll give you the last word. What should we be looking for from this point? Yeah, thanks, Dave. As Barb mentioned, Altrix has been the forefront of innovating with us. They've been integrating into making sure, again, that customers get the full investment out of Snowflake, things like in-database pushdown that I talked about before, but extensibility is really what we're excited about. The ability for Altrix to plug in to this extensibility framework that we call Snowpark, and to be able to extend out ways that the end users can consume Snowflake through SQL, which has traditionally been the way that you consume Snowflake, as well as Java and Scala and now Python. So we're excited about those capabilities. And then we're also excited about the ability to plug into the data marketplace to provide third-party datasets, right? Third-party datasets in financial services, third-party datasets in retail. So now customers can build their data applications from end to end using Altrix on Snowflake with a comprehensive 360 view of their customers, of their partners, of even their employees, right? I think it's exciting to see what we're gonna be able to do together with these upcoming innovations. Great stuff. Barb, Tarek, thanks so much for coming on the program. We've got to leave it right there. In a moment, I'll be back with some closing thoughts in a summary. 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