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Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, today announced a partnership with Microsoft to extend its offering to the Azure cloud. Since Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake, has worked at Microsoft for over 20 years, it's certainly not surprising that Microsoft is the company's second partner after working with Amazon since its inception. . But Muglia says that it really was about seeing the demand from customers on the market more than any nostalgia or connections at Microsoft. In fact, he says the company currently ships one to two new Azure customers per day.
The plan is to open a private foretaste today, then to become generally available in the fall when they work on all the inconveniences involved in transferring their service to another provider.
The partnership did not happen overnight. It's been growing for over a year and that's because Muglia says that Azure is not as mature as Amazon in some ways and that it took an engineering cooperation to make everything work.
"We had to work with Microsoft on some of what we needed to run [our product] [on their platform]especially on the way we work with Azure Blob Storage, that we really had to do a little bit differently on Azure, so we had to make internal changes to our product to make it work, "he explains.
Overall, engineers from both companies worked together to solve these problems and Muglia says that when the Azure version becomes Generally available in the fall, it should be basically the same product that they offer on Amazon, although there are still some devices that they are trying to operate in the world. "Our goal is to literally have the same product on Azure as on Amazon, and we are very confident that we will get there with Microsoft," he said.
For Snowflake of course, this repres a substantial expansion of the market. can sell to companies working on Azure and Amazon and has opened a brand new pipeline of customers. Azure is the number two cloud provider behind Amazon.
The interesting aspect of all this is that Amazon and Microsoft compete in the cloud of course, but Snowflake is also competing with each cloud provider with their own product. Yet this type of partnership has become the norm in the cloud. You have to work on multiple platforms, then compete where it makes sense.
"Almost all the relationships we have in the industry, we have an element of competition with them, and so it's a normal mode of operation," he said.
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