The Snowflake IPO took place during mid- September 2020. The company intended to go public at some point in summer 2020. But the pandemic put that on hold. With the logistical issues dealt with, the cloud company, based out of San Mateo, California, saw its shares surge more than 111 percent in its market debut on the New York Stock Exchange, in what is said to be the largest ever software IPO. Snowflake’s board have also seen their profits rise.
At the end of the first day of trading, Snowflake was valued more than General Motors, Dell, and Uber.
Chetan Mathur, CEO of Canadian company Next Pathway tells Digital Journal what Snowflake, offering its established ‘data warehouse-as-a-service’, did right.
Matur: Snowflake pursued an extra round of financing before going public. During their last venture round, many investors questioned the round, saying “why not go public now?”
Digital Journal: How important is scale?
Mathur: I think that helped them really set the stage and provide the right level in preparation of their initial public offering. By replacing Bob Muglia for Frank Slootman, Slootman has the ‘play book’ for taking high-growth companies public. He executed his strategy perfectly. This consisted of bringing in his own lieutenants into key positions, re-organizing their sales teams, and placing a big focus on migration solutions.
DJ: What are the challenges of legacy systems?
Mathur: Migration from legacy systems is key for growing in the Enterprise market. Customers require an answer on how to get to Snowflake, especially if they are invested in different legacy systems.
DJ: What are the future ramifications of this kind of company flotation?
Mathur: Snowflake is a gamechanger for the data capture and “Big Data” market. From a technical perspective, what the founders did by building the platform up from scratch placed them apart from the legacy vendors. Going forward, we will see more and more enterprise companies seeking to take the leap to migrate off of on-premises environments to Snowflake.
Snowflake’s value-added concept is their ability to leverage their infrastructure, hence making a solid value-add for enterprises developing a multi-cloud strategy. An important thing to watch will be how Snowflake crosses the line as both partner and competitor with the major cloud vendors.
