After establishing a foothold in the cloud-based data warehousing market on the infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services, Snowflake Computing is expected to announce Thursday that its customers will now be able to run its data warehouse on Microsoft Azure.
Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia, a Microsoft alumnus who ran significant businesses at the software company for decades, hinted at such a move in an interview with GeekWire on the sidelines of AWS re:Invent 2017 last November, and the company is now making it official. Snowflake’s database is immediately available on Azure, the second-leading cloud computing service and increasing beneficiary of a trend toward multicloud infrastructure.
Snowflake built and maintains a cloud-based data warehouse, a particular type of database that is designed for analytical applications that place a greater importance on reading data, as opposed to applications that prioritize writing data to a database. It has attracted a great deal of attention from investors, who have poured $473 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion in hopes it emerges as one of the major database companies of the cloud-native era.
Given Muglia’s long history with Microsoft, it wasn’t hard to predict that Snowflake and Microsoft would strike a partnership at some point. Still, Snowflake established itself as a bona fide database provider on AWS, a sign of just how strong Amazon’s cloud division is among the IT buyers of the world.
“The vast majority of our customers want Amazon. But when we hear other clouds, I would say nine times out of ten, it’s Azure,” Muglia told GeekWire last year. As multicloud strategies become more and more prominent over the next year or so, such flexibility will be required from a lot of software-as-a-service vendors to support more than one home for their applications.
