Interesting to read through selected single anecdotes by company executives on some products:
ETR Data: This model shows the highest and lowest citation-weighted Net Scores within the Global 2000 in preliminary January 2023 TSIS data. Many of the names mentioned here by IT decision makers (AWS, Databricks, Grafana, Microsoft, Snowflake, UiPath, Zscaler) are among the highest-ranked vendors in our work. (also - Crowdstrike is scored in the upper right)
Relevant to DDOG:
ETR Insights 287: Head of Infrastructure & Information Security - Large Financial Services Enterprise
“I think we are definitely a best-of-breed company. We are looking at the best solutions to satisfy our requirements. For example, Dynatrace is perhaps the Rolls Royce for monitoring. We are using Dynatrace to monitor our technology stack and ensure we have full visibility and to ensure we can react to incidents and prevent instability from increasing, escalating, or moving to the higher level of incidents.”
Relevant to ZS:
ETR Insights 288: CIO - Large State Judiciary System
“We recognized the value of using Zscaler for everything, connectivity across all of our devices. Our full infrastructure now runs through Zscaler, as we’ve started bridging application access, which is the Holy Grail for us, making sure users can only go where we want them to go. We looked at them specifically for that “zero trust” between devices so you couldn’t jump back and forth, and it eliminated a channel for viruses and ransomware. We accomplished that and the VPN, and we also have a combination between Microsoft and Zscaler that we use for two-factor. Now we’re looking on the application side.”
Relevant to SNOW:
ETR Insights 310: Principal Software Engineer, VP - Large IT Services Enterprise
“So far, [AWS] has been unable to [usurp Snowflake]. This is sort of my area of expertise, and so far they’re struggling. I think for AWS, they have a “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Redshift is probably the closest Snowflake competitor, but they’re definitely not building out everything else that Snowflake has. I don’t see them taking over Snowflake at any point in this space. Snowflake is singularly focused on execution for the data warehousing niche they’re in, but I should point out Snowflake still runs on AWS, Azure, or GCP. AWS still gets a cut of whatever Snowflake is doing, is essentially what I’m saying. Processing and storage is effectively a passthrough bill, but Snowflake has a lot of value. […] AWS is never the one differentiator for Snowflake. Snowflake is one product, whereas at AWS there’s a couple. Redshift is a fork of a very old Postgres database, but it’s quickly evolving through multiple engine rewrites, etc., to be the type of offering like Snowflake was, meaning the separation of storage and compute. So, I think for Snowflake, they have three things: The separation of storage and compute, meaning multiple people can query stuff not bumping into each other, all on-demand. Direct data sharing, so I load a table on my side, I share it with you, you get it, you don’t need to run ETL, and you can use it with the rest of your stuff. Redshift is catching up to that and the marketplace.”
ETR Insights 314: VP, Manager of Data Analytics - Large Financials Enterprise
“Historically, Oracle has been our primary go-to database, but strategically that’s not got a bright future. […] With Oracle, how many people do I need to manage that, to define constraints, keys, and indexes? I work with a 20-year veteran who’s worked on an Oracle database, and I asked them to be in charge of our Snowflake instance. Let’s just put it this way, he has not looked back.”