Welcome to what’s series. We are gonna talk – what’s Snowflake is all about.
We will be talking mostly about B2B (Business to Business) companies in this series. Business to Consumers are mostly straightforward and products are well known.
Lets get started, before even moving on about the details of the company we need to know about something called data warehouse?
What is Data warehouse?
A Business organization always get ample amount of data from lot of sources. These sources may be customer data from CRM, supply chain data, sales data, finance data from finance department or anything for that matter. Where will this data be kept? Before knowing where, it is important to know why do we need this data. Running a business involves making lot of informed decisions and calculated risks – for that you need lots of data to analyze, see patterns to understand – which is nothing but business intelligence (BI). We can do ‘n’ number of things with this data, but we need to store this in a place, we call that as data warehouse.
Now, what is database and data warehouse. Let’s talk about the major differences between them. I don’t want to define what exactly are these terms. But, I tried writing in most non-technical terms – database is a very specific place for storing data for some particular applications or set of applications. We can think database as a component of data warehouse.
Let’s talk about snowflake now!
Snowflake is a cloud computing based data-warehousing company offering a cloud-based data storage and analytics service, generally termed “data warehouse-as-a-service“. According to the company, they built a completely new data warehouse using a unique architecture that has three layers – cloud services, processing and database storage decoupled to each other.
Quick Company Info:
- Founders: Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski
- CEO: Frank Slootman
- Stock Ticker: SNOW (New York Stock Exchange)
- Head Quarters: Bozeman, Montana
- Competitors: Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Azure SQL Warehouse.
- Snowflake Data warehousing Market share: 17.9% (Estd)
Glance at Snowflake
There are many interesting facts about this company. It would be awful not to write that here:
- Firstly, why the name snowflake – The company’s name was chosen as a tribute to the founders’ love of winter sports.
- Stealth mode: This is one of the interesting part of the company’s story. Stealth mode is temporary state that company maintains fake mission statement, false products offering, misleading development and all other news to keep the real work secretive in order to avoid alerting competitors. Snowflake has been in stealth mode from 2012 to 2014.
- Biggest IPO in 2020: Snowflake broke many records at the time of its IPO in the year 2020. It’s the biggest software company IPO in USA (as of now).
Some Finances!
Biggest IPO and stock doubled on the IPO day. Warren buffet has bought 6 million shares before IPO. There are many crazy news about this stock during 2020. Find out little more about the company from tool that I have build to fetch you all the company details in here – https://github.com/ManidharVutla/Stock-Info
It will create you a fancy html report – about the company financial information and culture FOR FREE 😉 . I have explained about installation in the readme section. It would be a little bit hassle to get it done, once you do – you would love it.
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