The Biggest Half?

The first half of Snowflake’s FY25 ended recently and a whole lot has happened. You’ve probably heard about Cortex, our GenAI capabilities; Snowpark Container Services + Native Apps; and the suite of governance and security features known as Horizon, among other things. But what about the technology partners that so many customers use? How are they taking advantage of these new features to make using Snowflake even better?

Apps!

Snowflake announced Native Apps several years ago and has continued to build out capabilities around it. This year we’ve seen two of the most important capabilities launched: Streamlit in Snowflake (SiS) and Snowpark Container Services + Native Apps (SPCS + NA). SiS is an open-source Python library that allows developers to create data apps. SPCS + NA allows partners to run their container based workloads in Snowflake and make them available as apps to consumers. So if you’re a customer this means that your data doesn’t have to leave Snowflake and you don’t need separate infrastructure to run apps.

Some of the noteworthy apps created as a result of these advancements include:

• ALTR : By leveraging ALTR's FPE (Format Preserving Encryption) capabilities, businesses seamlessly encrypt and decrypt sensitive data directly within Snowflake, eliminating the need for costly on-premises appliances.
• AtScale - AtScale provides a semantic layer for business intelligence, virtualizing queries on Snowflake to deliver OLAP performance without data size limits, offering fast, interactive analytics with optimized BI client connections and AI orchestration.
• CARTO Analytics Toolbox : a comprehensive suite of user-defined functions (UDFs) and stored procedures, designed to extend the geospatial capabilities of Snowflake
• data.world Plug-in : includes a UI that enables users to quickly setup database and table connections to data.world and run both dwSQL and SPARQL graph queries against data.world datasets and projects where Snowflake data has been included
• dbt Labs : extends the dbt experience, providing visibility into data models and lineage, orchestration observability, and “Ask dbt” - a dbt-assisted chatbot powered by the dbt Semantic Layer and Snowflake Cortex
• Genesis Bots : GenBots enable enhanced enterprise productivity, reduce operational costs, and streamline workflows by leveraging state-of-the-art GenAI models
• H2O.ai : H2O has created several Native Apps including Driverless-AI, eScorer, h2oGPT and LLM Studio. Their machine learning and predictive analytics platform is also available as a Native App
• Informatica Enterprise Data Integrator : a high-performance, low-latency way to integrate your Oracle and SAP data into Snowflake
• Kumo : helps data scientists make highly accurate predictions about user and customer behavior by combining graph learning over structured data and generative AI models trained for unstructured data
• LandingLens by Landing AI: empowers users to create and train computer vision models even if you don't have a background in AI, machine learning, or computer vision.
• Maxa : streamlines the conversion of raw ERP and business data into unified, pre-calculated decision-ready insights across business themes
• Posit Workbench : a comprehensive enterprise solution for R and Python developers and data scientists
• baioniq ?? by Quantiphi: offers features for accessing, domain-adapting, and fine-tuning foundational LLMs, securely in the cloud environment of choice while adhering to Responsible AI principles
• Relational AI : extends Snowflake with native support for an expanding set of AI workloads (e.g., graph analytics, rule-based reasoning, and optimization)
• SAS Data Maker : your shortcut to creating top-notch, secure datasets without the hassle and privacy risks of gathering real-world data
• Sigma Computing : Sigma has created two Native Apps, Sigma Data Path and Sigma Python. The Sigma Data Path Snowflake Native App is a containerized version of Sigma. Sigma Python provides business users to analyze, visualize, and collaborate using Python.
• Snowplow : Snowplow’s Digital Analytics native app extends Snowplow’s connected app to create out-of-the-box models and visualizations of website+digital analytics, right inside of Snowflake.?
• Pancake by TDAA!: a data engineering tool for schema discovery, analysis and automated data pipeline generation on data stored in VARIANT columns in Snowflake and supports JSON, Parquet, Avro, and ORC.
• Seek Native by Seek AI: a natural language interface that empowers business users to query structured data in plain English, providing accurate insights, reducing ad-hoc requests, and enhancing data-driven decision-making with over 90% accuracy
• Synthetic Data Generator by Datamynd: Easily profile production data to generate high-quality synthetic data
• Tonic : Tonic Textual manages unstructured data securely, optimizing it for AI by parsing, de-identifying, enriching, and synthesizing documents.

GenAI

I bet you didn’t expect to see any mention of GenAI here. Of course you did, it’s all anyone talks about these days. And for good reason, it allows people to interact with their data through natural language and more easily solve complex problems.

Similar to data apps, GenAI related capabilities have been embraced by partners of every kind. Need to translate, perform sentiment analysis, summarize, or generate a response within your data pipeline? Data integration partners like Coalesce , dbt , Informatica , Matillion , and Qlik have you covered. Want your analysts to have access to the same functionality? Sigma makes that possible. Looking for a no-code way to build LLM powered apps and do LLMOps? Have a look at Dataiku’s LLM Mesh . What about addressing the needs of Marketing, like audience segmentation and discovery or automating churn and conversion scores? Look no further than GrowthLoop and Rudderstack .

While GenAI gets most of the attention, let’s not forget about Machine Learning. Dataiku created Visual Snowpark ML , a plugin to train machine learning models and then use them to score new records – all within your Snowflake environment. And Hex created a solution architecture to help you build models quickly with Cortex.

Security & Governance

Snowflake’s single, cross-cloud governance model has always been a powerful differentiator, enabling customers to manage their increasingly complex data ecosystems with simplicity and ease. Last fall, Snowflake introduced Horizon. Horizon is Snowflake’s built-in, unified set of compliance, security, privacy, interoperability and access capabilities. The first half of this year saw the launch of exciting new features that partners were quick to integrate. These features enable customers to maximize existing investments and manage their entire data estate with catalog, lineage, security, and data quality capabilities through integrations with leading partners.

The following are a subset of partners from the Snowflake Horizon ecosystem that customers should be aware of:

• Alation - Alation’s Open Data Quality Initiative (ODQI) uses Snowflake Horizon and the joint solution integrates Snowflake’s Data Quality Metric Functions (DMFs) and other Horizon features as part of their? data quality framework, extending data quality capabilities into Alation
• Anomalo - Anomalo uses and builds on top of Snowflake Horizon to extend the capabilities to enable Table Observability, Data Quality Monitoring, Data Lineage,? Issue Tracing and Unified Access Control.
• Ataccama - Ataccama leverages Snowflake Horizon to power its Data quality with advanced DQ rule types with pushdown processing and improved data lineage for Snowflake.
• ATLR? - ALTR’s cloud-native integration leverages Snowflake Horizon to simplify and automate data access control and security for users including Data Classification, Real-time Observability over Sensitive Data Access, Dynamic Data Masking & Automated Access Controls? and Advanced Data Protection?
• BigID -? BigID leverages and builds upon Snowflake Horizon features to provide Compliance, Secure the Right Data, Meet Data Privacy Mandates and provide Data Ecosystem Interoperability.
• CastorDoc - CastorDoc’s integration with Snowflake Horizon's focusses and brings to bear several governance and security capabilities such as? Metadata Management, Dynamic Data Masking, Row Access Policies and Object Tagging and Management
• Collibra - Collibra provides capabilities to Safeguard sensitive data at scale, enable Data Quality, provide full traceability of your data from source to destination with end-to-end-lineage by leveraging and building upon Snowflake Horizon
• Immuta - Immuta integrates with Snowflake Horizon to provide for data access control, Data Discovery, Real-Time Policy Updates and Enhanced Privacy & Compliance
• Informatica - Informatica enables a macro set of integrated services to complement Snowflake Horizon including Comprehensive Data Cataloging and Data Lineage , Data Quality and Observability, Metadata Management, Data Privacy and Protection:
• Satori - Satori helps customers improve their data governance function with integration to Snowflake Horizon and providing capabilities for Continuous sensitive data discovery, Data access workflows and Unified security policies?

For a complete list of all of our Horizon partners, visit the Snowflake Horizon Partner Ecosystem page.

Final Thoughts

It's not a stretch to say we saw more innovation the first half of this year than any previous half in recent memory at Snowflake. Will the second half of the year be bigger than the first? With more apps coming onto Marketplace everyday, and features like Cortex Analyst , Fine-tuning , and Polaris Catalog entering Public Preview, it's very likely. We'll keep you posted!

One more thing - PARTNERS, WE NEED YOUR HELP!

As part of the shared responsibility model, Snowflake offers a number of security-enabling enhancements which help customers mitigate the risk of password compromises. Customers use a variety of connectors, drivers and data apps offered by partners to connect to Snowflake. So we need your help, partners, in getting customers to move from user/pass to more secure authentication methods.

For more information, please refer to the following assets (accessible only to registered Snowflake partners):?

Video: https://snowflake.seismic.com/Link/Content/DCqcRDJRgfT3D8mPggMhbRDPHQmd

PDF: https://snowflake.seismic.com/Link/Content/DCgbb6PPpqXVWGFTFCDhbMQ3f27d

For customers who want more details on protecting their accounts, please see the Snowflake Admins Can Now Enforce Mandatory MFA blog.

A special thanks to Sam Mittal and Ravi Kumar for helping me put this together, as well as the broader Partner SE team for all of their work to make the above happen.