It is interesting that Google has been unwilling to partner with SNOW at all, and is losing out on business, according to SNOW’s CEO/CFO on recent conferences (while AWS has embraced SNOW, and MSFT has had no apparent problems with them).
Now, Google has announced a Data Cloud Alliance that includes Databricks.
In this new Google cloud alliance, many of the partners have already had existing relationships with Confluent, Elastic, MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis Labs.
Also interesting to note is that Google continues to lag behind in cloud market share (around 9%, versus 33% for AWS and 22% for Azure).
I guess if you had to choose between partnerships with AWS/Azure vs partnership with GCP, you’d probably go with the former, which SNOW has managed to do.
However, you’re correct in saying that it has not been embraced like the other two major cloud providers have.
Speculation here, but when we look at the product landscape of these three vendors, Google has Big Query where Microsoft and AWS have no equivalent. Google’s product is completely serverless and a generation ahead so I suspect their aim is to use that as their differentiator to win new business rather than give up high margin business to a third party. For the other two, it’s easier for them to partner with SNOW than build their own product in this space.
Google has Big Query where Microsoft and AWS have no equivalent.
AWS has had RedShift for a while now. Microsoft introduced Synapse on Azure a couple years ago, and while it’s not as direct a competitor, it does have data warehousing, supports SQL with MPP (Massively Parallel Processing), and is setup for analytics, like Snowflake.
Google’s product is completely serverless and a generation ahead so I suspect their aim is to use that as their differentiator to win new business rather than give up high margin business to a third party.
Snowflake and Redshift now both support serverless operation as well.
Amazon has always and consistently taking the “frenemy” approach: They try to offer something for everybody, in case anyone wants to stay within Amazon billing, but also do not hesitate to support any third-party service that wants to run on AWS. We saw this with MongoDB a while back - Amazon decided to provide the open-source database product as a service (calling it DocumentDB), but also continues to support (and probably even promote) MongoDB’s Atlas. MongoDB had to change their open source language for future versions to prevent Amazon from continuing to provide all of its features themselves. BTW, this is how the eCommerce side of Amazon runs, too: they offer products for sale from Amazon directly as well as any third party sellers that have the same product. By default, they list the cheapest offering (and yes, promoting Amazon’s if it’s the same price), but let you choose from whom you want to buy through Amazon.com.
Azure is kind of in-between Amazon and Google in my view. They don’t promote third party services as much, but they do offer them and have a marketplace for you to find them. My take is simply that Amazon and Microsoft have better Sales & Marketing departments than Google.
I wrote about this before. Google has an entire compete team to fight SNOW. It sees SNOW as a competitor in the data market. Hence why would be illogical to partner with them at this time.