Snowflake opens UK office amid strong momentum across EMEA

Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, is opening a new UK office and Customer Experience Centre (CEC) in London, providing the ultimate workplace experience to employees and an area for collaboration with prospective clients.

This coincides with the company’s impressive growth following a successful fiscal 2023, which saw the company continue to shift the EMEA sales team to a vertical-focused model, drive wider customer adoption and consumption in the region, deliver developments and innovations related to data and application collaboration, and increase availability of its developer offerings with the GA of Snowpark.

Alison Tierney, SVP EMEA, Snowflake, said: “In FY23, we were laser-focused on shifting and cementing our position as a fully-fledged vertical company. This enables us to have deeper conversations with customers where each function from sales to marketing is driving the value of our tailored industry Data Cloud offerings to meet the opportunities and requirements associated with industries from financial services to retail.

“In the year ahead, we will focus on a few core areas for our EMEA customers, such as Snowpark, Customer 360 and ESG. These will empower our customers to develop new applications, help them understand the end-to-end journey of their own customers, and harness data to drive sustainability.”

In FY23, Snowflake’s product revenue in EMEA grew 72% YoY. The company also expanded its team in EMEA by 68%, reaching 1,289 in total as of January 31, 2023. In the UK specifically, Snowflake announced its availability on Microsoft Azure, a key milestone driven by high customer demand for local data residency both in the private and public sector.

Julien Alteirac, area VP UK&I and Benelux, Snowflake, said: “We are seeing growth across all verticals, and as the number of customers increases, the attraction and value of the Data Cloud for our prospects has followed.

“The opening of our new office is testament to our growth in EMEA and demonstrates our long-term goals in expanding our activity in the UK market, and supporting Snowflake’s sustained and continued growth in the coming years. As the second CEC to launch in the EMEA region the space will act as a strategic tool to build strong relationships, customer intimacy and trust. It is also a great opportunity to collect valuable insights from them to innovate and further develop our products and solutions.”

The new UK office will occupy 3,434 square metres in the heart of the city, near Liverpool Street, and is doubling in size capacity-wise. Sustainability is also at the heart of the new office. The building is cladded with a terracotta facade that has a low carbon emissions rating, and ensures the cooling and heating systems within the building remain in balance and highly efficient. The building also maximises heating efficiency by utilising a shared energy centre. Furthermore, all third-party vendors, such as hospitality and cleaning staff use entirely ecological and free pesticide products.

EMEA Corporate Momentum

Snowflake finished fiscal 2023 with impressive consumption. Key EMEA milestones from FY23, include:

Product revenue for the twelve months ended January 31, 2023 grew 72% YoY to $268.2m, and global product revenue for the twelve months ended January 31, 2023 was $1,938.8m.
Worldwide net revenue retention rate was 158%.
1,289 EMEA employees with over 5,880 employees worldwide (as of January 31, 2023), a marked increase from the prior year, which had 766 EMEA employees and nearly 4,000 global employees as of January 31, 2022.
Snowflake expanded its availability in EMEA to the France (Paris) region on AWS, and availability in the United Kingdom (London) region on Microsoft Azure. With these expansions, Snowflake now supports 37 global regions across three cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, and Azure).

Global Corporate Momentum

Snowflake’s corporate momentum in FY23 was driven by the launch of the industry-specific Data Clouds, employee growth and several acquisitions, all enabling organisations to mobilise the world’s data.

Telecom Data Cloud– Telecommunications service providers can leverage the Snowflake Telecom Data Cloud to break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, enabling organisations to easily and securely access data in near real-time, enrich it with machine learning (ML) models, and then share and analyse it to drive better decisions.
Manufacturing Data Cloud – With Snowflake’s Manufacturing Data Cloud, organisations can build a data foundation for their business, improve supply chain performance, and power smart manufacturing initiatives in today’s digital-industrial world.
Snowflake completed a number of acquisitions to help customers maximise value from their data, including:
- Streamlit, a data applications framework, in combination with Snowflake’s Data Cloud enables developers and data scientists to build and share data apps and to do so quickly and iteratively, without the need to be an expert in front-end development;
- Applica, an AI platform for document understanding, helps Snowflake’s customers more easily leverage unstructured data in the Snowflake Data Cloud;
- Myst, a company specialising in time series forecasting, helps Snowflake customers to make more accurate forecasts to guide management, facilitate planning and goal setting, and help mitigate risk;
- SnowConvert, a Mobilize.Net suite of tools, is significantly reducing migration effort and improving the speed of customer data migrations to Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
During fiscal 2023, approximately 1,900 net new employees joined Snowflake, and Snowflake plans to continue hiring in fiscal 2024, in product, engineering, and sales.

Product Innovation

Snowflake has been laser-focused in updating and developing new innovations to its platform in FY23:

Snowflake released new platform innovations, including two new workloads:
- Unistore provides a modern approach to working with transactional and analytical data together in a single platform. Unistore streamlines and simplifies the development of transactional applications, while providing consistent governance, strong performance, and near-unlimited scale to customers.
- Cybersecurity provides a unified, secure, and scalable data platform for helping security teams eliminate blind spots and respond to threats at cloud-scale.
Data programmability enhancements: Snowpark for Python (GA), and a native integration with Streamlit (PrPr), currently in development, make Python’s rich ecosystem of open-source packages and libraries accessible for data scientists, data engineers, and application developers to streamline development, and build and share interactive applications. 20% of customers have now tried Snowpark.

Customer Growth

Snowflake in EMEA has doubled-down on industry specific customers and digital native companies who are mobilising their data in Snowflake’s Data Cloud:

The number of EMEA customers grew to 1,678, representing a 34% YoY growth, with worldwide customers totalling 7,828 (31% YoY growth).
100% of Snowflake customers surveyed in the Dresner Advisory Survey 2023, said they would recommend Snowflake to other organisations for the 6th year in a row.

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Duncan is an award-winning editor with more than 20 years experience in journalism. Having launched his tech journalism career as editor of Arabian Computer News in Dubai, he has since edited an array of tech and digital marketing publications, including Computer Business Review, TechWeekEurope, Figaro Digital, Digit and Marketing Gazette.

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