People to Watch 2019

If they look at the desire to really take control of their data and to understand and manage their data it’s much easier to do that in a cloud environment where you have the elastic scalability of the cloud underneath you. It’s very difficult for companies with fixed resources to fully get control of all of their data and what’s wound up happening is virtually every company has data scattered in many differed silos and it’s very difficult if not impossible to cohesively manage it in that format. So the cloud provides a tremendous opportunity for companies to simplify the way they work with data because for the first time they can put it all in one place, it can be secured and managed in a consistent way and they can institute the controls that they need to ensure that they’re achieving the compliance that they have to such as GDPR. The cloud is solving a problem for customers particularly with a solution like Snowflake, that’s very difficult to solve in a non-cloud way.

It’s not inevitable, but you have to think about it to avoid it. Hadoop is fairly different than the cloud; it is essentially an open source tool kit with a variety of different services inside of it that can be put together by the customer. The thing that makes Hadoop so particularly challenging is that these components and tools are quite low level and it really is incumbent upon the customer to figure out how to run, manage, and connect them. As a result, very few and really only the most sophisticated customers have been able to be successful.

The cloud is a little bit different in that if you look at what Amazon provides for example, or other cloud vendors like Microsoft or Google, they also provide a toolbox but in general the tools are higher level than the tools you would get from Hadoop, but of course Amazon or Microsoft runs those for you so you’re not burdened with that. If Hadoop is a do-it-yourself toolbox, where you’re given a set of instructions and you then have to put it all together yourself and find all of the components you need, Amazon is a set of tools that are available that you can mix and match, we think there is a third solution and it really is what a product like Snowflake is delivering which is a full and complete database and data warehouse as a service.

This provides customers with a much more complete data solution if you look at the kinds of solutions customers are solving with Snowflake, they’re using Snowflake to solve a problem that they would need a half a dozen different tools in Amazon’s toolbox to solve. So we do simplify things even more than the cloud vendors do and I would say the cloud vendors are quite a bit simpler than Hadoop.

So I don’t think it’s inevitable, but I do think that it takes a certain approach to prevent that complexity from creeping in.

One of my favorites which is one of my oldest…I’ve always been a technologist and I’ve always enjoyed technology and I’ve certainly had my share of playing with it over the years. When I was a little younger, I was running Windows Server at Microsoft. I was in the process of remodeling my house and I put a full data center in my house. At one point I had 11 Windows Servers running inside of the house to manage the house. I did this because back then we had a product called Small Business Server, which could run a small business with a single server. Certainly, that was much more than adequate to run my house, but what I found was larger customers were trying to assemble a number of different components from Microsoft and other vendors and they were struggling with it. So I decided to put myself in my customer’s shoes and try and learn that.