Snowflake Computing, the cloud data warehousing startup that emerged from stealth mode last year, has announced the general availability of Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, along with US$45 million in Series C funding.
Snowflake views data warehousing as a software service, mixing structured and unstructured data in a virtual cloud warehousing architecture with querying and analytics capabilities. The GA release of Snowflake’s Elastic Data Warehouse offers customers a SQL data warehouse delivered as a low-cost cloud-based SaaS.
“The cloud has changed the game in data warehousing,” said Snowflake CEO and former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia in a news release. “However, simply ‘cloud-washing’ a conventional data warehouse misses that opportunity. Organizations want to get more value from their data, not simply bring their current challenges into the cloud, or worse, create problems by deploying complex solutions that force them to retrain their staff and abandon existing tools and processes. From day one, Snowflake has had a singular focus on reinventing the data warehouse, building from the cloud up to solve the data analysis needs of customers.”
The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse includes native support and optimization for structured data and machine-generated, semi-structured data in a single database engine with multi-dimensional workload elasticity. The fully distributed and replicated warehouse also includes a self-tuning service for automated management of data distribution and storage, as well as an enterprise security suite that has secure authentication, granular access controls and end-to-end data encryption.
Snowflake’s $45 million Series C funding round came from global investment firm Altimeter Capital, joined by existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures.
