Let’s Summit-Up! Everything You Missed at Snowflake Summit 2022
Thousands of Snowflake partners, customers, and industry peers recently came together for Snowflake Summit 2022 — Snowflake’s four-day conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada. The goal of the event is for attendees to network, collaborate, and obtain essential knowledge about Snowflake and emerging trends in data and analytics.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the expanded capabilities and product innovations announced, provide useful links to Summit-related content, and share what I personally enjoyed throughout Summit.
The theme of Snowflake’s conference this year was “the world of data collaboration”. As a company whose mission is to collaborate with data teams to help them find solutions and achieve their goals, the Hashmap team was so excited to sponsor and attend Summit alongside NTT DATA. We loved meeting so many new and familiar faces in person, discussing how our experts can accelerate your data and cloud initiatives, and of course, our technology partnership with Snowflake!
If you’re interested in attending Snowflake Summit 2023, I recommend reading Jeno Yamma’s Climbing the Snowflake Summit blog post. Jeno provides an excellent breakdown of what it was like to attend Snowflake Summit 2022 including lodging, the sessions they enjoyed, after-parties, and much more.
So what all did you miss? Let’s Summit-up!
Expanded Capabilities and Product Innovations
In the opening keynote, Snowflake Chairman and CEO, Frank Slootman, and Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products, Benoit Dageville, announced seven key innovation pillars that position Snowflake at the forefront of technology and data innovation. You can watch the keynote on-demand here.
Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake SVP of Products, then revealed the expanded capabilities and product innovations that advance the Data Cloud¹:
- Unistore Workload: Snowflake’s transformative Unistore workload, currently in private preview, will unlock new transactional use cases, and deliver a modern approach to working with transactional and analytical data together in a single platform.
“Snowflake Summit 2022 brought a host of interesting announcements including the bold move to support transactional workloads Snowflake Unistore | Unify Analytical and Transactional Data and hybrid architectures by way of external tables that can access on premise data through an S3 compatible API which will allow customers to keep their data on premise.” — Anthony Bulk, SOLN/Services Line Sr. Specialist Advisor, NTT DATA
- Native Application Framework: Snowflake’s Native Application Framework, currently in private preview, empowers developers to quickly and easily build, monetize, and deploy data-intensive applications in the Data Cloud.
- Cybersecurity Workload: Snowflake’s new Cybersecurity workload provides a unified, secure, and scalable data platform for helping security teams eliminate blind spots and respond to threats at cloud-scale.
- Data Programmability Updates: Snowflake’s data programmability enhancements, including Snowpark for Python, currently in public preview, and a native integration with Streamlit, currently in development, make Python’s rich ecosystem of open-source packages and libraries accessible for data scientists, data engineers, and application developers to streamline development, and build and share interactive applications.
- Expanded Data Access: Snowflake’s new innovations increase data access with enhancements for working with streaming data through Snowpipe Streaming, currently in private preview, and Materialized Tables, currently in development, alongside making data stored in open formats and on-premises available in the Data Cloud with Iceberg Tables, currently in development, and External Tables for On-Premises Storage, currently in private preview.
- Snowflake Marketplace Advancements: Snowflake Marketplace now goes beyond just data, expanding to offer applications that run natively in the Data Cloud so customers can get value faster, improve security and governance, and access cutting-edge technologies for extended collaboration efforts, while providers can reach more customers and use built-in monetization through Snowflake’s Marketplace.
“I am excited about the new app sharing feature and the change of Snowflake ‘Data’ Marketplace to Snowflake Marketplace. This opens a lot of doors for new data products to be available and I see infinite possibilities there.” — Vinayak Shinde, Principal Coud Architect, Data, Hashmap
If you’re interested in hearing more about Snowpark for Python, Streamlit: Democratizing Your Data Apps, Snowflake for Cybersecurity, or Data Governance & Security Enhancements, I recommend you attend this Snowflake Summit 2022 Highlights webinar.
Notable Sessions
The four-day conference was jam-packed with over 250 sessions featuring Snowflake customer success stories. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas (and the same goes for sessions at Snowflake Summit!). A large majority of the Summit sessions were not recorded, but you can watch the ones that were recorded here. You can also find over thirty interview recordings, live from the Summit floor here. I recommend checking them all out, but there are two from our technology partners I’d like to highlight:
- Kuntal Vahalia, SVP, Channel and Alliances, ThoughtSpot, sits down with Dave Vellante & Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit 2022 to discuss digital transformation with self-service analytics for the modern data stack and how they work with Snowflake. You can also check out our ThoughtSpot focus page here.
- Matthew Scullion, CEO and Co-Founder, Matillion & Harveer Singh, Chief Data Architect & Global Head of Data Engineering, Western Union, sit down with Lisa Martin & Dave Vellante to discuss Matillion’s recent updates and how Matillion accelerated Western Union’s data cloud initiatives throughout the pandemic. You can also check out our Matillion focus page here.
Hashmap and NTT DATA hosted two sessions during Summit:
Milissa Campbell, Health Plan & Life Sciences Consulting Lead at NTT DATA, presented a session on Utilizing Your Data to Provide Personalized Healthcare with Snowflake’s Data Marketplace. She specializes in leveraging her extensive operations experience to develop analytics strategies and programs that deliver meaningful and actionable outcomes and value. Check out this blog post for a summary of what she covered in her session.
David Hrncir, Data Cloud Expert at Hashmap, and Ajay Bidani, Digital Enablement and Insights Manager at Powell Industries presented the first-ever, live Hashmap on Tap podcast session! In true Hashmap “on Tap” fashion, David and Ajay sipped on mimosas and discussed key issues including Data Mesh, Building Data Apps, and Data Governance, along with Modern Data Warehousing, Data Integration, and Data Cultures. Check out this blog post to find out what they discussed in this informative session.
Additional Summit Highlights
Two big Summit highlights for our companies were NTT DATA receiving the “APJ Global SI Partner of the Year” award. The award is given to partners who have contributed to Snowflake’s business in the Asia Pacific and Japan regions, and this is the second consecutive year that NTT DATA has received the award.
Additionally, during the partner keynote, Hashmap was mentioned for “producing great Snowflake content”. We have won the Snowflake Ski Lift Content Competition for FY2021 and FY2020, but it was fantastic to be recognized in front of all of Snowflake’s technology partners. Hashmap is a small, boutique-consulting company, so it was great to hear we’re making waves within the Snowflake community. Since becoming an early partner with Snowflake in 2018, we have produced over 200 Snowflake technical articles, podcast episodes, case studies, and videos which are driven from the 100+ Snowflake projects that the consulting team has delivered as a solution integration and application consulting partner.
The Snowflake and Hashmap partnership has evolved with global customer adoption of Snowflake over the past several years, and to date, Hashmap has engaged more than 1,500 Snowflake customers across a range of open-source Snowflake utilities and accelerators.
On a more personal note, I would like to give a shoutout to the people in the image above. These are my coworkers from both Hashmap and NTT DATA. I sincerely appreciate all of the efforts this team made in the preparation for Snowflake Summit 2022. Not everyone who made contributions to our attendance at Summit is pictured, but from the hours spent preparing for session presentations, reaching out to clients about Summit activities, and all of the event marketing responsibilities, I sincerely appreciate their support.
I really enjoyed making new connections at our booth as well as meeting so many people from our technology partners I had only previously met digitally. The best part was working with my coworkers in person; even though we try, it’s challenging to make personal connections with team members when we are constantly bouncing in and out of Google Meets. At Snowflake Summit, however, we were able to socialize at our booth, special dinners, and other evening activities. There’s a lot of quality time spent together that would never happen with virtual events and I am so glad we chose to sponsor and attend Snowflake Summit 2022.
Related Resources
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Leah Hudson is a Senior Marketing Analyst at Hashmap, an NTT DATA Company, and co-produces the Hashmap on Tap Podcast.
