Premium: The rise of data apps

It's high time I walked through the slew of announcements from Snowflake's Summit this summer and boiled down what I thought was most impactful. Dig in ... this is a long one (though summarized upfront for the skimmers).

Snowflake's annual Snowflake Summit was in Jun-22, and was back to being in person for the first time since 2019. A recap blog post estimated there were 9K in-person attendees, and 11.5K virtual ones, with Snowflake giving over 80+ different announcements across the 275+ keynotes & sessions, as well as press releases and blog posts.

Mgmt hinted last quarter that Summit will have some of the biggest announcements in the last 4 years, and they weren't overselling it. They have been making some pretty big moves, both as the culmination of baby steps they've been taking over the past year or more (Snowpark, native data apps, monetization of the marketplace, expanding data lake access & data science use cases), and revealed some huge new ones (Unistore, hybrid tables, native Iceberg, streaming pipelines). It was a huge event, so let's focus on what matters most to Snowflake's long-term trajectory – the expansion of what the Data Cloud covers, and the rise of data apps over and within that Data Cloud.