I posted this on X but just finished the report.
Just finished $SNOW call. I’m very happy with where they are and what they’re doing. I’m excited about the new CEO.
Many people’s (including my own) biggest complaint with Snowflake over the past few years is how long new features take to get to GA or even Open Preview (where customers can start to use it). VERY happy to hear Sridar say in his opening statement,
"To deliver on the opportunity ahead, we must have clear focus and move even faster to bring innovation on the Snowflake platform to our customers and partners. This will be my focus. "
And later in QA
“…getting this in the hands of our customers, and having them realize value is the top priority.”
"Getting them out quickly and driving adoption is easily my highest priority. "
“And that’s why acting with speed and urgency is especially important for us.”
“need to react pretty quickly to a very quick silver AI landscape is what I’m going to be focused on”
I think his history indicates a high likelihood of success here, especially with what the much smaller Neeva team did in a short time and on a much more limited budget.
CHANGED & MUCH MORE CONSERVATIVE GUIDANCE One thing I’m looking for in future quarters is bigger beats than the past year with more conservative than before guidance.
Changed forecasting, “We have evolved our forecasting process to be more receptive to recent trends.”
Q - “it looks like you’re guiding with a lot more conservatism than a year ago.”
A - “I think we are definitely being more conservative this year given the consumption patterns we saw in '24”
Paired with, " There’s a lot of new products coming into GA and public preview this year that we have not taken into account in our forecast, and we will do so once we start to see that consumption. And so, we will take this quarter by quarter for the year."
“we’ve revised our model to look at more recent history rather than going back too far in history for forecasting consumption patterns”
"There’s a lot of new performance enhancements being rolled out on our software this year that are going to have an impact. "
@galacticbarrier posted an interesting observation from RPO & revenue the past couple years. My numbers are a bit different than his, he had 73% both years. I have 79% & 76%. In both cases however, RPO indicating 40% YoY for next FY. If the number drops say 5%, 30% YoY.
Here’s another example of their more conservative guidance: “We expect approximately $50 million of GPU-related costs in fiscal year '25, approximately $10 million flowing through cost of product revenue. For the purpose of forecasting, we’re not including any incremental revenue associated with these features.”
Modeling to PAY for GPUs but not to USE them. Even if they get 50% margin (lower than their 78%), that raises the guidance by 1.5% or so. The
Snowflake Advantage, ease of use: “Snowflake Cortex, we are implementing it as a core platform layer. It ships with every deployment and it makes AI readily accessible from SQL, so that even an analyst that’s not an LLM expert or a Python expert can simply write SQL for things like summarization or sentiment detection data that is already in Snowflake. Our overall aspiration here is to make AI really, really simple for our customers to use.”
“the things that we’re driving toward is creating easy ways for people to be able to talk to subsets of data”
Improved GCP terms 62% growth in jobs = 33% rev growth
Guiding SNOWPARK revenue to triple for the year from 35M to about 100M!!
LOTS OF NEW PRODUCTS HITTING GA AROUND SNOWFLAKE SUMMIT. Wonder what new products will be announced at Summit?
Cortex will be in public preview very soon, and we expect it to be generally available on and around the Summit’s time frame.
Snowpark Container Services is already in public preview in AWS, and we expect it to be generally available in that same time frame, give or take a couple of months from Summit.
Iceberg Tables is already on public preview across all three clouds, and will be generally available again, also in the Data Cloud Summit time frame.
Unistore, which enables combining transactional and analytical capabilities in single applications went very recently into public preview in AWS and will be generally available in the second half of the year.
expect a strong showing of product capabilities at the Data Cloud Summit.