Top 5 Takeaways From the Snowflake Summit 2022

Yes! In-person events are back and the 2022 Snowflake Summit was like a time machine – propelling attendees back into the way conferences used to be pre-pandemic. Despite the heat in Las Vegas, Nevada this time of year (day time temps were in the 100’s and there was LOTS of walking), almost 10,000 data engineers, data wranglers, data strategists and data enthusiasts took part in the 3-day Snowflake conference to hear about all things Snowflake and to discuss the broader data ecosystem. 

The Data Clymer team was also there….and, in case you missed it, here are some of the top learnings and takeaways from our team. 

1: Snowflake Growth and Market Opportunity 

The growth of the cloud database market continues to accelerate which was highlighted during this year’s Snowflake Summit.  Some 10,000 attendees along with 200+ Snowflake partners attended the Summit which is a testament to Snowflake’s continued growth. Snowflake claims it has approximately 6,000 customers, 200+ of which have trailing 12-month product revenue over $1M (up from 184 customers as of Jan. 31).  And, nearly two-fifths of the Fortune 500 are now leveraging the Snowflake Data Cloud, as these companies continue to execute on their cloud migration and digital transformation strategies. 

Snowflake’s revenue continues to also grow, recently beating analyst expectations for its most recent quarter. As the Snowflake customer base grows, understandably so does its credit backlog, reaching around $2.3 Billion – a huge opportunity for Snowflake and Snowflake partners.  

And, according to Gartner, the overall cloud data warehouse market size is around $26 Billion, which is about 40% of the overall (on-prem + cloud) database market and is expected to grow in 2022 to around 50% of the overall market.  The growth in the cloud segment of the data warehouse market has outpaced Gartner’s expectations (forcing them to revise analysis for 2022), with potentially some of the credit here going to Snowflake and its progress.

2: Innovation and Expansion of the Data Cloud

As with any user conference, the host vendor typically leverages its conference as a platform to make various new program and product announcements.  The Snowflake Summit was no different.  Some of the more important Snowflake announcements include: 

Snowflake Unistore:  Unistore enables Snowflake to now handle transactional related data in addition to the typical analytical data that Snowflake manages.  As the name implies, Unistore creates a single, unified platform for multiple data workloads by leveraging Hybrid Tables, a new table type within Snowflake, without the need for additional products or services.  Our CEO Aron Clymer summed it up by saying, 

“This is a huge milestone along the journey towards running your entire business on Snowflake, starting with your curated single source of data truth!” 

Snowpark and Streamlit: Snowflake has enhanced its Snowpark library by providing programming language constructs that now support Python in addition to SQL. This new capability is partially due to its recent acquisition of Streamlit, a platform that turns data scripts into sharable web apps, all in Python.  The result here is developers and data science professionals now have the ability to build native data apps within the Snowflake Data Cloud by leveraging Python, a language these professionals often prefer. Leveraging Python will also serve to embed analytics into more workloads and business processes, pushing analytics into the hands of more data consumers.

3: Native Applications and Monetization 

On top of enabling Python for developers and data professionals, Snowflake has also built out a platform-as-a-service like framework enabling organizations to not only build applications but also businesses on top of Snowflake.  Supporting native applications, as part of the Snowflake Marketplace, will allow individuals and organizations to quickly build and monetize new data applications as well as alleviate many of the security, governance, deployment, scalability, and data sharing challenges typically faced. As part of this announcement, the Snowflake Marketplace will now support native applications, allowing Snowflake customers the ability to find and install these applications directly within their Snowflake environment. Snowflake currently has over 1,300 applications on its marketplace and this will only help to accelerate and expand that list – and solve more customer data challenges.       

4: The Continued Rise of Open Source Environments 

Open source environments continue to advance in an effort to support a growing community of data professionals who prefer an assortment of tools and frameworks vs. traditional software environments.  Our team rounded up a few thoughts on this growing trend. 

Apache Iceberg:  As part of its attempt to address a lack of openness for the Snowflake Data Cloud, Snowflake announced its support for Apache Iceberg at the conference.  Apache Iceberg is a new high-performance, open table format standard designed for analytic tables. This format enables engines like Apache Spark, Trino, Flink, Presto, and Hive to work with traditional SQL tables and bring them into more big data use cases.   

dbt: Great to see our partners over at dbt at the Snowflake conference.  We understand this was potentially the first major conference sponsorship for dbt and the buzz at their booth was noticeable. This is no doubt due to the open source community of over 25,000 data professionals that dbt has helped to create.  dbt also had a number of sessions and workshops and their name was seen as part of a few of the evening networking events.  

Airbyte: Our team had a couple conversations with the Airbyte crew and it appears their approach to open source data pipelines is making some progress. Not only are they developing their own data pipelines but they are also relying upon other developers and partners to create more bespoke pipelines that Airbyte will host and provide some quality assurances. After launching in 2020, the company has built a following of around 20,000 companies and is moving over 500 billion rows of data each month. While there is some management involved in building and hosting Airbyte data pipelines, clearly there is some market demand for this approach.  

5: Data Cloud Specialties and GTM Enablement 

Snowflake has been pushing industry related use cases and focus areas for a couple years now but these seemed to have come front-center at this year’s Summit.  Snowflake is working with its partner ecosystem to build out specialties within six core areas including financial services, health care and life sciences, retail and consumer packaged goods, advertising media and entertainment, technology and government. As part of this effort, Snowflake is also creating an industry solution certification program for partners to certify expertise in these industries.  Presumably, Snowflake will also promote and recommend partners who obtain these certifications thereby enabling new go-to-market channels in these areas.  

Data Clymer Partner Shoutouts

We would be remiss if we didn’t also express some gratitude to some of our key partners for taking time out of your busy schedules to not only meet with us but to also partner with us throughout the Snowflake conference to drive awareness for our joint solutions.  

Sigma:  Thanks to the Sigma team for providing Data Clymer with the opportunity to present at your booth. It was great to also meet with many of you throughout the event and we appreciate all your support before and during the event! 

Matillion: Thank you to the Matillion team for the opportunity to present at your booth.  Our joint panel session with data leaders from the Minnesota Vikings, Indianapolis Colts, and Las Vegas Raiders on the value of a team owned data stack – with Matillion as a key part of this solution – was great and something that we hope to replicate in the future.  It was also great to interact with the team throughout the conference and to learn more about the Matillion vision for the future. 

Atlan: Thanks to the Atlan team for taking time to speak with us about our partnership and opportunities for the future.  It was great to meet Atlan CEO Prukalpa in person and to continue conversations around growing our partnership.  We also appreciate the invite to the Data after Dark event and enjoyed networking with many other data professionals there! 

dbt: Thanks to the dbt team for spending time with us and for continuing our conversations around how we can grow our partnership together. Our team continues to identify various use cases that involve dbt and has become an expert at implementing dbt

Flywheel Software: Thanks also to the Flywheel Software team, one of our newest partners, for spending a fun evening with the Data Clymer team and for discussing opportunities for us to work together in the future! 

Snowflake: Last but definitely not least, it was great to connect with many from the Snowflake team to build relationships and to also learn more about partnership opportunities, joint prospecting, and territory mapping. Thanks as well for the hospitality throughout the conference and for hosting such a great event. We look forward to continuing to partner with Snowflake and to attending future events!  

What Do You Think?  

Did you attend the Snowflake Summit this year? If so, let us know what you think! We at Data Clymer believe the Snowflake Summit is quickly becoming THE must attend data conference. This is where the data ecosystem is converging to announce disruptive new technologies, platform innovations, and expansive new partnerships. This is where Snowflake users, customers and partners are coming to learn more about not only Snowflake but also everything that makes up the modern cloud data stack. There was definitely a buzz throughout the conference that was palpable…and we think this is going to continue for years to come!  

If you were there, let us know what you think!  Post your comments on our LinkedIn or Twitter page.  Feel free to also Contact Us with questions or to learn more about Data Clymer. 


Jesse has over two decades experience as a marketing professional within many successful technology and data management companies including Fivetran, Matillion, and SendGrid / Twilio. Jesse is Head of Marketing at Data Clymer and responsible for promoting the Data Clymer brand and amplifying the success of Data Clymer customers.