Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI

Rhea-AI Summary

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) announced new platform advancements at BUILD 2024 to help enterprises manage data and AI more effectively. Key developments include the general availability of Snowflake Open Catalog, which enables integration of new engines and governance controls across Apache Iceberg implementations, and Document AI, which extracts insights from PDFs using natural language. The company also introduced enhanced security features through the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, including Leaked Password Protection and Programmatic Access Tokens, along with new Storage Lifecycle Policies to help organizations better manage storage costs and compliance.

Positive

• Launch of Snowflake Open Catalog for improved data integration and governance
• General availability of Document AI for enhanced document processing capabilities
• Introduction of Storage Lifecycle Policies to optimize storage costs
• Enhanced security features including Leaked Password Protection and Programmatic Access Tokens

Negative

• None.

Insights

Tech Expert

Snowflake's platform evolution marks a significant technological leap with three key developments: Snowflake Open Catalog for Apache Iceberg integration, Document AI reaching general availability and enhanced security features in the Horizon Catalog. The Open Catalog addresses a critical market need for flexible data architecture while maintaining governance, potentially expanding Snowflake's addressable market. The Document AI implementation, leveraging their Arctic-TILT model, positions them competitively in the unstructured data analysis space. The security enhancements, particularly the leaked password protection and programmatic access tokens, demonstrate proactive risk management that enterprise clients demand.

These developments strengthen Snowflake's competitive position against both traditional data warehouse providers and cloud hyperscalers. The focus on interoperability and open standards while maintaining enterprise-grade security could accelerate enterprise adoption and reduce customer churn.

• Snowflake Open Catalog allows users to easily adapt as the needs of their organization evolve, integrating new engines and applying consistent governance controls across them
• Snowflake is making it easier for enterprises to derive insights from PDFs and other documents using natural language with the general availability of Document AI
• Snowflake adds new threat prevention and security monitoring capabilities to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog to help enterprises further safeguard their data

No-Headquarters/BOZEMAN, Mont.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced at its annual developer conference, BUILD 2024, new advancements to its market-leading platform that enable enterprises to cut through their data and AI chaos to accelerate value. Today, Snowflake serves as a leading platform for enterprise data lake, data warehouse, data lakehouse, and data mesh architectures — delivering a unified, fully managed service that eliminates complexity and maintenance for users.

Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI (Graphic: Business Wire)

Snowflake’s platform empowers organizations to harness all of their data, whether it’s structured, unstructured, or semi-structured, with increased interoperability across various platforms. This gives customers more choice and flexibility to select the data architecture that’s best for them, while benefiting from the built-in compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake Horizon Catalog.

“We give enterprises the power of choice when it comes to their data estates, and our industry-leading platform and governance capabilities serve as the data foundation for organizations to build powerful AI apps and models at scale, all with complete control and flexibility over their data,” said James Malone, Head of Data Storage and Engineering, Snowflake. “Our continued advancements around Apache Iceberg and the new Snowflake Open Catalog, alongside their easy integrations with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, bring increased simplicity to organizations’ complex data architectures so they can accelerate value, while reducing the number of steps required to use and govern their open lakehouse architectures.”

Snowflake Enables Customers to Unlock Value from All of Their Data, Regardless of Where it Lives

Snowflake’s flexibility extends beyond architecture options, enabling users to harness their data with full interoperability, regardless of where it resides. For enterprises that prefer to store their data in Apache Iceberg™, the industry’s open table format of choice, Snowflake is helping users more effectively integrate and secure their open lakehouse implementations with Snowflake Open Catalog (now generally available). As a managed service for Apache Polaris™ (Incubating), Snowflake Open Catalog allows users to easily adapt as the needs of their organization evolve by integrating new engines and applying consistent governance controls across them. Snowflake Open Catalog will continue to evolve in functionality as the Apache Polaris project does, while users also benefit from the reliability, security, scalability, and support provided by a Snowflake-managed service.

“Snowflake Open Catalog gives our global teams the flexibility to integrate all of our tools in one place, with comprehensive read and write support from various engines, while maintaining the unified governance we depend on to effectively manage our open data lakehouse,” said Vineet Gorhe, Chief Technology Officer, DemandHelm. “Snowflake’s commitment to true open source without vendor lock-in gives us the confidence to innovate faster, without having to worry about the complexities of setup, maintenance, and updates for our lakehouse strategy.”

To help users further reduce costs, improve performance, and turn data lakes into more open lakehouses with Apache Iceberg, Snowflake is also unveiling a slew of new features for streaming, ingestion, change data capture pipelines, and integrations.

Outside of Apache Iceberg, Snowflake is making it easier for enterprises to derive insights from other data types within the AI Data Cloud, including unstructured data with Document AI (now generally available on AWS and Microsoft Azure). Document AI leverages Snowflake’s state-of-the-art large language model, Arctic-TILT, and extracts information from both text-heavy paragraphs and other content within documents — such as logos, handwritten text like signatures, or checkmarks. Hundreds of business leaders from organizations including Florida State University, Intelycare, Osmose Utility Services, and more are using Document AI today to effortlessly distill insights and analytical values from PDFs and other documents using natural language.

For organizations that prefer a vendor-managed architecture to host all of their data within the AI Data Cloud, Snowflake is constantly improving the economics of its leading platform so that organizations don’t have to manage their own data and catalogs. To further enhance this, Snowflake is introducing the new Storage Lifecycle Policies (now in private preview) to help organizations better maintain storage costs and compliance with new ways to archive or delete data. In parallel, Snowflake is continuing to make legacy relational database management system migrations to Snowflake even easier by adding additional Views support to SnowConvert, Snowflake’s native code conversion tooling.

Snowflake Adds New Threat Prevention and Security Monitoring Capabilities to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog

The security of customers’ Snowflake accounts has been a business priority from day one, and Snowflake continues to innovate in order to make the platform more secure by default. As a result, Snowflake is enhancing the Horizon Catalog to include credential theft prevention and detection by automatically disabling users’ passwords discovered on the dark web through Leaked Password Protection (generally available soon). In addition, the Horizon Catalog is adding support for Programmatic Access Tokens (PATs) (in private preview soon) for API authentication, which simplifies the developer experience for application access while enhancing security by including scope and expiration for such tokens.

Snowflake is also strengthening its industry-leading security posture management through enhancements to the Snowflake Trust Center, a tool that helps organizations monitor and improve the security of their Snowflake accounts. Snowflake is announcing the new Threat Intelligence Scanner Package (now generally available) that provides a Risky User View to automatically detect which users — human or service — are risky with clear mitigations on how to reduce said risks. To help unlock innovations from cybersecurity partners and address customers’ diverse security needs, Snowflake is also extending the Trust Center through custom scanner packages (in private preview soon) available as Snowflake Native Apps on the Snowflake Marketplace, starting with five marquee partners including ALTR, Hunters, OneTrust, Rubrik, and Trustlogix.

Additional announcements to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog include the public previews of Lineage Visualization Interface for Data and ML Assets and Synthetic Data Generation, alongside the recent general availability of Differential Privacy Policy.

“As a leading customer experience transformation consultancy, Merkle relies on the Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s robust governance and advanced security monitoring capabilities to safeguard our customers’ most sensitive data, preventing unauthorized access and data exfiltration between internal teams, allowing the right people to have access to the right information at the right time,” explains Morten Lileng, Global Head of Merkury Engineering, Merkle, a dentsu company. “With Snowflake, we have full visibility into our data usage, all of which is critical for protecting our customers and ultimately maintaining their trust.”

Learn More:

• Read more about how Snowflake is simplifying data architecture, data governance, and security to accelerate value in this blog post.
• See how you can get started with Snowflake Open Catalog today using this tutorial.
• Learn more about Apache Polaris (Incubating) on GitHub and find out how you can contribute to the project.
• Get the latest on what’s new with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog by checking out these demos.
• Check out all the innovations and announcements coming out of BUILD 2024 on Snowflake’s Newsroom.
• Stay on top of the latest news and announcements from Snowflake on LinkedIn and X.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

© 2024 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names or logos mentioned or used herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Snowflake may not be associated with, or be sponsored or endorsed by, any such holder(s).

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).

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241112377796/en/

Media Contacts:

Kaitlyn Hopkins

Senior Product PR Lead, Snowflake

press@snowflake.com

Source: Snowflake Inc.

FAQ

What new features did Snowflake (SNOW) announce at BUILD 2024?

At BUILD 2024, Snowflake announced the general availability of Snowflake Open Catalog, Document AI, enhanced security features including Leaked Password Protection, and new Storage Lifecycle Policies for better cost management.

What is Snowflake's (SNOW) Document AI and when will it be available?

Document AI is now generally available on AWS and Microsoft Azure, using Snowflake's Arctic-TILT language model to extract information from PDFs and documents, including text, logos, handwritten text, and checkmarks.

How does Snowflake (SNOW) Open Catalog improve data management?

Snowflake Open Catalog allows users to integrate new engines and apply consistent governance controls across Apache Iceberg implementations, while providing reliability, security, scalability, and support as a managed service.