Snowflake Computing, Interview with CEO Bob Muglia

Bob MugliaSan Mateo-based cloud data warehousing company Snowflake Computing has just closed $45m in Series C funding and announced general availability of the Snowflake Elastic Data WarehouseTM.
In conjunction with these announcements, CEO Bob Muglia answered some questions about the company, the funding and future plans.

FinSMEs: Hi Bob, can you tell us a bit about you?
After working for more than 20 years at Microsoft and a couple of years at Juniper Networks, I joined Snowflake a year ago. It was obvious to me that the Snowflake team was doing something really different, something that would matter a lot to business customers.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Snowflake. Which problem do you solve?
Every business is generating data that can help them to better understand and serve their customers. The challenge they face is how to gain insight from that data in order to act upon it. The solutions available today – both traditional data warehouses and the so-called “big data” products – are very expensive, hard to manage and were not designed for a cloud era. Customers are struggling for an answer. Snowflake provides that solution.

FinSMEs: How does it work?
Every data solution on the market today is expensive, and complex infrastructure that IT needs to manage. Snowflake is a software service – like Salesforce – that makes it easy for companies to gain control of their data. We were designed to work in the cloud so we provide the performance and flexibility that customers expect from a cloud solution. We also solve the problem of bringing together both transactional and machine generated data into a single system that enables companies to achieve a deep understanding of their business.

FinSMEs: Where are you in terms of growth?
Our overall team is almost 80 people from across the technology industry, and we are growing quickly.

FinSMEs: You just closed your series C round. How are you using the funds?
We are growing across every group in the company but the majority of focus is growing our sales team. We also continue to grow our engineering team.

FinSMEs: Future plans?
Snowflake has a unique architecture that allows customers to work with data the way they want. Because we’ve separated the data from the compute, we allow essentially infinite scalability. As much data as you want, queries can run as fast as you’d like, and you can add as many users as you’d like.

This architecture allows many extensions in the future. We are looking at ways to make it even easier to use the Snowflake product and make it more powerful. Snowflake is the best data warehouse the world has ever seen, but we can and will make it even better!

FinSMEs

23/06/2015

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