Snowflake Strengthens Leadership in Cross-Cloud Collaboration for Enterprise Data and AI

Nov. 12, 2024 — Snowflake today announced at its annual developer conference, BUILD 2024, new innovations that make it easy and secure for teams to find, evaluate, and share data, AI models, and apps internally, and with external partners and customers.

Credit: Michael Vi/Shutterstock

Through Snowflake’s leading cross-cloud collaboration capabilities, users can now accelerate their AI initiatives with direct access to Snowflake’s expansive ecosystem of enterprise data and AI products, while speeding up app development for end users — all from within the security and governance boundaries of the AI Data Cloud.

“To keep up with the evolving data and AI landscape, enterprises need instant access to all of the data within their organizations, supplemented with their customers’ and partners’ data, in order to build powerful AI apps at scale for crucial decision-making.” said Prasanna Krishnan, Head of Collaboration and Horizon, Snowflake. “That’s where Snowflake’s industry-leading cross-cloud collaboration comes in, enabling organizations to not only access and share their most valuable data, but also apps and AI models, both internally and externally with third-parties. Snowflake’s latest innovations unlock new ways for teams to collaborate on these initiatives and bring AI and apps into production faster, while handling security and governance implications to reduce risk.”

Snowflake Enables Collaboration and Sharing Within Enterprises, With Built-In Governance

Building AI apps and fine-tuning models is often resource-intensive and time-consuming, and it’s difficult for many enterprises to collaborate on this work across various teams without introducing significant complexity and privacy considerations. With Snowflake’s Internal Marketplace (now generally available), users can easily discover available data, apps, and AI products from other teams and business units within their organizations — while preventing unintended sharing to external parties.

The Internal Marketplace also allows users to share fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) (now in public preview), making it easier for them to collaborate on generative AI use cases with increased model accuracy and performance for use case-specific tasks, and then deploy them into production. This is all done securely from within the AI Data Cloud, eliminating the need to make copies of data or transfer it between accounts. Data products listed on an organization’s Internal Marketplace can also be easily evaluated using natural language with the new Copilot for Listings (now in private preview), an AI assistant that generates and executes high-quality SQL commands and answers questions on structured data, enabling customers to quickly determine whether shared data is relevant to their work.

“As a leading global mobility-tech company, it’s crucial to use the full potential of data to provide our customers an unforgettable travel experience,” said Tobias Hadem, Vice President of Engineering, Flix Mobility. “Snowflake’s Internal Marketplace will empower our data teams to promote and securely share their data products within the organization, driving informed, data-driven decisions across the company.”

Build, Distribute, and Monetize Data and AI Products Faster

In the era of AI, enterprises need speed and flexibility to build sophisticated AI-powered apps at scale. Snowflake is streamlining the app development process so customers can focus on building the apps and models that matter most to their businesses, reducing operational burden and accelerating time to production.

To help organizations further build and deliver advanced apps, Snowflake is arming users with the Snowflake Native App Framework Integration with Snowpark Container Services (now generally available on AWS and public preview on Microsoft Azure). The integration allows users to easily build apps in their preferred programming language with fully customizable user experiences and then deploy them on top of configurable GPU and CPU instances, significantly enhancing the developer’s time-to-value. Published apps can then be seamlessly distributed across clouds and regions, all with enhanced observability and security across the end-to-end app development process. Companies like Genesis Computing, Kumo AI, LandingAI, RelationalAI, and more are using the integration to deliver and monetize AI-powered apps to Snowflake customers through Snowflake Marketplace, unlocking new revenue streams.

“We’re building our business exclusively on Snowflake, and thanks to the Snowflake Native App integration with Snowpark Container Services, we were able to launch our first product in a matter of weeks,” said Matthew Glickman, Co-Founder and CEO, Genesis Computing. “The integration gives us the flexibility to build sophisticated, enterprise-grade AI Data Agents at scale and quickly deploy and monetize our products on Snowflake Marketplace. Our partnership with Snowflake is providing tremendous customer value, and enabling Snowflake customers to harness the power of agentic AI in just a few clicks — all within the security and governance boundaries of the AI Data Cloud.”

The Snowflake Native App Framework is also adding support for the Snowpark ML Modeling API, which uses familiar Python frameworks such as scikit-learn, LightGBM, and XGBoost for preprocessing data, feature engineering, and training models inside Snowflake. Through Snowflake’s new Secure Model Sharing (now in public preview), model developers can use the Snowpark ML Modeling API to create and train models, store them in model registries within their accounts, and securely distribute and monetize these models through a Snowflake Native App on Snowflake Marketplace.

To give developers more control over their data, apps, and AI product distribution costs, Snowflake is unveiling a new Egress Cost Optimizer (generally available soon) to remove incremental egress costs, or fees associated with transferring data out of a cloud service or data center, when sharing data products to multiple cloud regions. The Egress Cost Optimizer offers developers significant cost savings, allowing them to allocate more resources to the initiatives that matter most for their businesses.

Gain Direct Access to Secure, Enterprise-Grade AI and Data Products In a Just Few Clicks

In just a few clicks, enterprises can try, buy, and deploy sophisticated AI apps and data products from Snowflake Marketplace, built by providers that can easily leverage the security and governance tools provided by Snowflake. Snowflake Marketplace continues to grow, with 220+ apps and 2,500+ datasets readily available today¹ for customers to harness within seconds.

For organizations with high levels of security requirements who have deployed Snowflake on Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS), or use AWS PrivateLink, Snowflake is introducing the Snowflake Native App Support for Secure Deployments (now generally available). Through this support, organizations on those secure deployments can now install and use Snowflake Native Apps. The Snowflake Native App Support for Secure Deployments enables secure data handling by reducing exposure to external threats, while helping customers maintain compliance with even the most stringent industry standards. Additionally, Snowflake Native App Compliance Badging (now private preview) allows organizations to easily identify apps that meet their internal compliance requirements like SOC 2, and recognize enterprise-grade products on Snowflake Marketplace at a glance.

Read more about the latest advancements spanning cross-cloud collaboration in this blog post.

About Snowflake

Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. Thousands of companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

Source: Snowflake