Cloud-based data warehousing provider Snowflake has launched its Powered by Snowflake partner program in Australia and New Zealand, adding significant development features to its platform.

The Powered By Snowflake program aims to help businesses and application developers build, operate and develop applications in Snowflake’s data cloud.

The program will provide partners with access to technical experts, workshops and assistance in designing the data architecture for the application, including best practices, references and guides.

Support engineers specializing in application development use cases will also be available to assist you with alerts, troubleshooting, and information about issues and support operations.

The program will also serve co-marketing initiatives through content and joint solution campaigns.

Snowflake now has 40 partners in A / NZ, vice president of Asia-Pacific sales, said Peter O’Connor. Some of them include global systems integrators such as Deloitte and Accenture, among national and regional players such as Servian, Versent, Altis and Mechanical Rock in Perth.

O’Connor, who joined the company in 2017 as the first regional employee, said Snowflake’s growth has accelerated in the market over the past three years, with more than 250 clients such as Canva, all increasing to 79 employees in its offices in Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and more recently in Canberra.

A new Australian support center has also been opened in Melbourne with plans to scale up to around 20 support engineers.

Recently, the supplier hired Nick Laidler as Channel Manager for Australia and New Zealand to accelerate its focus on regional partners.

“By the end of the year we expect to have around 105 employees, so we are growing at a steady pace and have recently moved into our new Sydney office in Barangaroo,” said O’Connor.

So far, the Snowflake platform has been available on Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Australia, with O’Connor hinting that Google Cloud was not far from being added to the mix.

Snowflake’s regional sales engineering manager Clive Astbury described some of the platform’s new features currently in ‘private preview’, such as its developer experience called Snowpark, which has been extended so that developers can create using their own preferred programming language and concepts.

Partners who integrate with Snowpark can access the Snowpark Accelerated Program, which provides access to technical experts and exposure to customers.

“Until now, Snowflake has been a pure SQL-based platform and Snowpark extends it to other languages ​​such as Scala and Java, extending the use to other developers who may not come from a context. SQL, ”he said.

It also added user-defined Java functions, so customers can bring their own custom code and logic to Snowflake while opening the time to value unstructured data, allowing customers to store, govern, process and share. file data with their structured data. and semi-structured data.

The addition of the Snowflake SQL application programming interface (API) allows custom and standard applications to call Snowflake directly through a REST API, without the need for client-side drivers, reducing complexity and overhead administration.

Other improvements have also been made in areas such as governance capabilities with classification and anonymized views.

New platform optimizations involve improved storage economics, support for interactive experiences, and a usage dashboard.

At the same time, new features within the Snowflake Data Marketplace, such as ‘try before you buy’, allow users to access sample data to see if it meets their needs and test it with their own set of data. data. There will also be new usage-based buying options that will allow customers to trade directly in the marketplace.

Senior Vice President of Engineering for Quantium data analytics consultancy Florian Pasquier has been a Snowflake client for approximately two and a half years and has said being able to use Snowpark will be a big step for the company. in order to be able to enter and exit platform code.

“Five years ago, we were exclusively an on-premise store and we were making products on our Hadoop platform. But realistically, when we looked at the tech landscape and how things were moving, we identified that we couldn’t use it for long in the way we were processing data and using analytics at scale, ”Pasquier said.

“As a data analytics store, we wanted to get ahead of the curve and started looking for what would give us that edge. We wanted a data partner that would stand the test of time for a specific product use and how we could serve our analytics in a more powerful way, and so far Snowflake has been that partner for us.

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