All right.
Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Keith Weiss. I run the US software research group here at Morgan Stanley. And very pleased to have with us Mike Scarpelli, CFO and Christian Kleinman, SVP product from Snowflake.
好的。感谢大家参加本次活动。我是Keith Weiss,目前在摩根士丹利担任美国软件研究小组负责人。同时,我们很荣幸地邀请到Snowflake的CFO Mike Scarpelli和SVP产品Christian Kleinman参加本次活动。
So thank you gentlemen for joining us.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
感谢各位先生能够加入我们。
谢谢邀请。
谢谢。
Before we get started, a brief disclosure for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research School of your website at www.morganfamily.com backslash research disclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.
Excellent. So that out of the way.
So actually I want to get started in the presentation with you Christian and talking about the market opportunity ahead of Snowflake.
I think one of the most impressive parts of the story is how that opportunity is evolved over the past couple of years.
I remember at the IPO, we were talking about roughly an 80-81 billion dollar market opportunity, but you guys have developed into sort of the adjacencies around your core business.
And now we're talking about $248 billion in market opportunity.
Can you walk us through the steps of how we got there, how we expanded out that opportunity?
Yeah, so the early days of Snowflake were all about helping organizations break down silos and consolidate their data.
If you look at pretty much every large organization they have a little bit of vertical and these are all these different data with technologies and it's hard for them to think across. So our thesis was let's help organizations combine the data and be able to think throughout the business.
And then what we saw is even when customers have been able to consolidate data, they keep finding reasons to start to copy bits and pieces of their own data into different systems.
Oh, I have an application that does some AI, so I copy the data. I have an application that does some graph processing I copy the data.
And our whole thesis is instead of re-silowing the data, how do we help customers bring that application, those business logic, into Snowflake, and that's when you hear us talking about Snowflake as an application platform, which dramatically changes the scope of what we do.
And intersecting this type of business logic on Snowflake, we're also very focused on helping organizations collaborate with data.
That's where data sharing technology fits in, that's where data, clean room technology fits in. And the intersection of all of this as we have to do for us, keeps getting larger and larger.
Got it. I think the data sharing element is probably one part of the Snowflake story.
I think people still under appreciate.
The way I think about it, in sort of the old data warehousing technologies, pricing was based on capacity, like how big is your data warehouse.
In the Snowflake model, 90% is compute.
How many questions are you asking of the data?
And in every company that I talk to, one of the primary reasons for moving into a cloud-based data warehouse, it's to enable more sharing and enable more people to ask questions of that data.
So I think there's an inherent expansion of the market opportunity that comes just from moving to the cloud, and just from getting that data sharing.
So we think of sharing or enabling sharing of data, both within an organization, but also across organizations.
And both are obviously very important and meaningful opportunity for us.
The way we think of sharing relationships is what we call an edge, which is the connection of two organizations or two parts of an organization, where they have activity one querying data from the other.
And that's what we call an active edge. So if I share there with you heat, we have an edge.
But the number that you hear or the metric that you hear us talk about is what we call stable edges, which are edges that have a minimum threshold of activity over a minimum amount of time, which tends to suggest that this is not a one-off conversation mic and I did, but it's a persisted ongoing relationship.
I don't know if you want to add anything?
No, that data sharing really creates a stickiness in terms of we're actually seeing RFPs out there from some of our customers are actually asking their vendors questions, are you a snowflake customer because they want to do data sharing.
So beyond just stickiness, it's driving new customer adoption on snowflake because people are insisting on doing data sharing through snowflake and you really see that happening in the financial services industry, which by the way shouldn't surprise you because the financial services industry has been sharing data for years and years and years.
Unfortunately, the data you've been sharing has been through FTP downloads, which is such an old technology or PDFs. And we can avoid all that. There's no reason why the whole concept of a bank statement going to a company is irrelevant. You can do data sharing so you don't have to actually transfer any data and you can just run your reconciliation directly against that in snowflake again.
We're working on things like that for our own use case internally and it's much, much more efficient way of doing things. And more importantly, because the data isn't getting transferred, it's secure in government and you know exactly who's accessing it. Right.
And just to continue down this thread a little bit, you talk about it in terms of creating stickiness from an investor perspective. I think one of the sort of holy grail that we're always looking for in our investments is where are there really defensible modes around companies because technology and software evolve so quickly.
It's hard to get a technology mode that remains durable, but ecosystems that people create around certain technologies and data sharing being one of them could potentially be that defensible mode. You talked about financial services. It could be a segue a little bit into sort of the industry focus because I'm sure this is probably one of the kernels of why you have this industry focus is to try to create these ecosystems.
Financial services is one. Can you walk us through some of the other verticals that you think you could develop these types of ecosystems in? Well, it's happening in the media streaming area with advertisers and media companies and data clean rooms is another form of data sharing and especially with all the privacy concerns today. That's definitely a key one.
Healthcare, there's all kinds of opportunities on both the payer side and as well as in pharma with the development of new drugs and stuff. There's a lot of data sharing that happens between companies in that. Many times the pharma companies use third parties to do part of the work on those things and that's an important piece as well too. You can pretty much apply it to any industry data sharing.
It's funny when you talk to people. I was actually talking to someone the other day as a CIO of a bank and I was talking about data sharing and he's like, well, we don't really do any data sharing. I'm like, okay. That's what most people say. Then when you dig into it, oh yeah, we send these reports to fidelity. We get these things. You are doing data sharing. You're just doing it in an inefficient way. On the industries we even heard state governments. Yes. You imagine how many agencies are there and they all would like or would benefit from collaborating. So I think it permeates every industry.
And it all comes back to asking more questions of the data and utilizing the data more fully. If we go one step further and talk about the concept of data cloud that you guys talked to and now becoming a platform for application development, that's probably even a bigger expansion. It's kind of the market opportunity in terms of app dev.
Why is Snowflake? Why is Snowflake the platform for doing this application development? And can you talk about some of the tools that there's a capability you brought on board like the native application framework and the stream lid acquisition that enable that application side of the data cloud to really come to fruition? Yes.
So the core thesis for us in this topic of collaboration is that in your organization that leverages second party data, third party data, second party and third party services will do better. And now at this point there are many studies where they show you will outperform your peers. If you've forgotten how to not only leverage your own data but how do you enrich and put your data in context.
That's the concept of the data cloud for us and that is what is unique about Snowflake. Technology, yes, we can deliver technology and we're very proud of the technology we have. But when a customer buys into Snowflake, he buys into this data cloud and data cloud is where all these ecosystem of players, data providers is one form of partnership.
But more interestingly, there's a lot of interesting IP, interesting business logic that organizations are creating and what we're doing with this concept of application platform and native apps in Snowflake is can you package that logic? Can you make it available to other customers? So now when a customer buys into Snowflake, they're buying through this ecosystem and we've seen customers that have passed on Snowflake. Like I'm not interested when they see some of the applications that are coming onto Snowflake they can do this data sharing that I can repurpose a team of 30 people that we're doing pipelines and ingestion and encryption and decryption. All of that goes away. That is the appeal and that's how we think of the data cloud unique for Snowflake.
No, I agree. And from a monetization standpoint, it all comes back to more questions being asked of the data and that's one of the really interesting things about Snowflake is such a straightforward pricing model, such a straightforward monetization model. It's actually a beautiful model that we really have one product, three different flavors of that product depending on which edition you want. But every new feature we have, our salespeople don't need to go in and get a PO out of a customer. They just need to go in and educate the customer so a customer can consume more and then the follow on capacity purchase orders follow.
The very simple model and I love it and the customer also because of our model, the way that we price, we sell a customer credit. A credit is a unit of measurement with the amount of compute you use and we charge you by the terabyte or terabyte of storage. You have and the beautiful thing of every software improvement, every hardware improvement that improves the price performance, you can do more with that same credit every year. So we become cheaper to our customers every year. And that's good because the better the price performance, the more workloads they move to us. The more performance, the speed at which we have. More workloads can come on to us that otherwise we weren't fast enough for. So our whole product roadmap is focused on more features that are going to drive consumption but then improving that price performance, the speed at which we operate.
And we have a data. One thing to say, the other thing is we can show that the amount of compute credit that we generate per query, per question asked, it keeps going steadily down with public this year. The last three years, roughly 20% better economics for stove because of platform. And our customers see that. They don't even give them past your answers but better economics. And you can see that too. I think we're right about three billion queries a day running through snowflake. We cross three billion. I know as of last week we're eight million queries short of three billion a day. But you can see how the number of queries have grown in snowflake. The revenue doesn't grow as much why because the price performance improves the customers.
We've got to improve price performance. We talked about a $248 billion tam but there's the address ability to that tam and you need to have the right price performance to address the entire tam as you improve that more and more of that potential market opportunity. You can serve as a more. Yes. We talk about the ML and AI opportunity within snowflake. And I think it's been a somewhat of an investor debate of whether a data warehouse, whether the snowflake architecture is correct for building ML, AI type of models on top of and workloads on top of. You guys announced a snow park for Python which I think makes it more applicable but Q20s was why the data warehouse and why it was snowflake is the right platform for building out these applications.
Core to what we want to do and enable for our customers is deliver programmability of data. So how do I get value, how do I extract value out of my data without fading off governance and security. And that's what's different from what you will hear from everyone. Everyone has Python. We get as a love. Why did it take you two or three years to incorporate Python into snowflake? Because incorporating Python in an unsecured way is easy. We can do it in a couple of weekends. But then you can ask CIOs, how do you know that your data science team did not download some library from the internet and it may have had a vulnerability and potentially exfiltrated data. And that's where the answers get a little bit less clear.
The networking team was in charge. What we offer and I'll get to your AI part of the question. What we offer is a secure way to program data. And when we say program data it can be just transform data or it could be doing AI and ML. So for us, AI ML is one additional workload that we want to support running close to the data in a secure fashion.
And then you can say you want to do training. We have customers coming into something to do training. You want to do machine learning scoring. We have customers coming into the scoring. And at our user conference we introduce this low latency storage mode we call unistore, which is very low, very fast reads and writes. That's very common for online feature stores, online recommendations, applications of ML.
Then you come and say, well there's a new thing called language models. Language models is nothing but here's another form of pre-trained machine learning. I want to be able to score that based on data that I have in Snowflick. I may want to be able to fine tune that based on data having Snowflick. And for us, it's a continuum. I'm not trying to dismiss the importance of AI but what is really important is do everything you want to do. Program data, do AI, do proprietary computations, do so without trading off security, governance, policy, privacy.
That's the value problem of Snowflick and it resonates with customers. And it's something I hear a lot when I'm talking to CIOs, particularly in regulated industries. When they're thinking about these large language models and stuff like chat, the security implications haven't really been explored. It is a real threat of data leakage on a go-forward basis. But if I'm hearing you correctly, today have companies that are utilizing Snowflick for training these models? Yes. And for sure, we have no only customers leveraging Snowflick for machine learning. Part of it, there is Snowflick for Python integration. Enable that.
We introduce a type of cluster that has more resources. We call it Snowflick warehouses, which are just about this. The one piece that you can say, well, you don't have is GPU support. That is for cases that's where this deep learning. And you can stay tuned. We'll be sharing more about this at our user conference in June. But fundamentally, we just think about it. The broad vision and broad goal for Snowflick is bring computation. Whatever the nature it may be, to run closer to the data, and AI and ML is just one such example.
Got it. Perfect. I want to dig a little bit into a unistore. That's something that you guys talked to us a lot about at the last annual stage. And it enables Snowflick to now address more transactional workloads. And for the broader audience, there's analytical workloads and transactional workloads. And historically, never the two shall meet.
Today, given sort of the computation resources, you guys have at hand, and it's not constrained, it's now more amenable. You can bring those two together. So one, you talked to us about the underlying technology that enables you to bring those two together. And two, what's the market opportunity that opens up when you can look at the data from both perspectives, both in terms of using it for transactions that also for the deep analytics?
Yeah. So I'll rewind a little bit on database history. In the very early days, a database was a database was a database and it did both transactional analytics. It's only that before my time. Way before my time, or I got the tail end of that. And then specialization happened.
And for example, Terra data, credit what credit do, say we're going to build a database focused on analytics. And many others follow the verticals, the thesis, et cetera, and Oracle and the B2 and others went on the transactional site. And for 20, 30 years, they were going to separate tracks. And as you said, they would never combine because the specialization was for each type of use case.
What's changed and what's different, which is the question we get asked on the book, okay, if this thing has never happened, why do you think you have a shot at succeeding years? The cloud helps us present a unified product, a unified experience for our customers. Even if behind the scenes, there are different ways to store the data. And that's what Unistore does. The implementation of Unistore, we call it a hybrid tables, hybrid because they have a storage system optimized for analytics and storage system optimized for fast, region rights.
But we can behind the cloud, tie all the details and data replicated, that have moved back. And what this does for us is now we enable customers to store data in Snowflake, build applications, application state or machine learning pipelines or machine learning inference and low latency. We're very fast reads, very fast writes, but also that they let seamlessly available for analytics. So it's the technology and the cloud, the fact that we're delivering a hosted service that enables us to do this. And I believe it's a big part of our application stack.
But if you want to say something about the market opportunity, yeah, no, it's, well, we don't know how big the market. It's really a good opportunity, but I think it's important to, I think it will be a revenue. First of all, the product is still a private preview today, it's on public preview. It will be in public preview at the end of this year. We've learned a lot from customers and we're revising some of the stuff on the engineering side.
But that will have a impact on margins because of the fact that there's du- there's duplication of data. Definitely it will drive revenue, but it will, it's not going to cause our margins to decrease, but it puts a gate as to how big the margins can get, the product margins in the company. But definitely opens up a massive market opportunity for us as well too, to be determined how big that is.
Yeah, and I would add that the bigger goal for us is enable full applications to run inside Snowflake. And if you look at the elements of an application, there's the core storage, so we have Snowflake Analytics as well as Unistore. You want a metal tier to be able to do processing that's where Snowpark fits in, and you want a presentation tier which is where Streamlit fits in, right? The combination of all of those, change the art of what's possible and how we think modern applications will be built and deployed in a secure way.
Got it. That's a good summary. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the business model and get into near-term results and maybe just stick with the theme of history lessons. I think one of the really interesting things about Snowflake is like how pure of a consumption model it is.
And if we think about it holistically from where we came from with perpetual license models where all the risk was put onto the end customer, like you got to figure out how to set it up, you have to figure out how to get productivity out of it, but upfront you give us a couple million dollars. With Snowflake, nobody's paying you until they're starting to run queries against the day.
Well, correct that. They're paying us many times up front but they're not incurring the expense. They're not incurring the expense, right? There's a commitment, but you're taking on a lot more of the risk. Yeah, we take on the risk, and that's why it's super important that we are there for our customer success and why we spend a lot of time and why we insist our salespeople stay engaged with customers in the seat model, and I know this one, I was the CFO of ServiceNow, and I know we buy a lot of licenses from other people.
It's painful when you buy a license and you start having the expense even though you may not start using it for six months. And so yes, we do bear that at Snowflake, but the benefit of that though is just as you can see a slow down, if people are tightening their belts, you can see an acceleration in our businesses will too, and people have more visibility into their business.
So people taking advantage of that flexibility during a tightening spending environment, and just to bring it back to the current results and what we've seen throughout 2022, obviously customers are taking advantage of that, and we've seen optimization in all sorts of cloud models including Snowflakes.
How do you get an assessment of where we are in that cycle? Yeah, so I think optimization is an overused term by many companies today. We've been talking about optimizations as far as two years ago, and at our financial analyst day we talked about this is this is nothing unique and this will be ongoing with any customer, but there are no big optimizations out there.
And optimizations just to be clear what they are, is we find instances where snow people have not written the most efficient queries that are taking up too much compute. We spend time on the professional services time to help them rewrite, re-engineer the query so they use less compute, but one of the biggest and low hanging fruits on optimizations, we've seen customers store data that they've never accessed, and why are you doing that? We've seen customers store the data twice in Snowflake when you don't need to.
We've seen customers where they would choose bigger warehouses than what they really need. They would disable the auto suspend function. Well, today we help you pick the right size warehouse that you need and take away a lot of that. You still customers can still choose, but we help you size the warehouse correctly. When you disable the auto suspend function there's a lot more alerting that happens on that, and we're monitoring constantly to make sure that warehouses aren't left hanging. That's what optimizations are for us. And we will continue adding product capabilities to do all of this proactively or automatically for customers. Nobody wants to cycle up, I grew up, I optimize, I grew up too much. We believe in you're always optimized and that's good for everyone.
And I have a team of people that literally look at spikes in revenue on a daily basis, and when they see something, we reach out to the customer driven by finance with the rep to do that, understand what's going on. You may say, why am I doing that? I know if we have an unhappy customer that they left a warehouse running or they're using snowflake inefficiently, they're going to ask for credit back. And so I'd rather get in front of that. But more importantly, we reforcaster revenue on a daily basis based upon the prior days consumption. And if I'm incorrectly reforcasting on spikes that aren't real spike, like ongoing consumption, then I have a problem. So we do that. I don't know a single vendor that's ever reached out to me to tell me when I'm consuming too much of something. So you feel comfortable that you've flanned out that curve. If you look at that, you've taken out the any excess. There are no big optimizations that are unaware of. And it's now, it's a matter. There's not some small ones, but there's no big ones out there when I look at the top customers.
Got it. So when we think about the adjustment of the 40 year kind of revenue guidance that you did on the last conference call, that was less about optimizations or not about optimizations about consumption patterns. It's about customers ramping more slowly. And what I would say is early adopters by their nature tend to move faster. And a lot of our early customers were, let's get up and running on Snowflake, who cares about costs and we'll worry about optimizing later the more. I don't want to say, um, laggards, but the later adopters tend to be more methodical. They tend to be more cost conscious. Those, a lot of our early customers were the digitally native companies that were very fast moving and were growing so quickly, they didn't really care about costs. But when you're dealing with well-established global 2000 companies, these guys have always cared about costs and they just move at their own pace. And what we're seeing is we've landed so many of these large customers over the last three, four years. They just grow slower than these digitally native early adopters. Got it. They're still going to get to the same end and state. Okay. So the destination remaining is the same. It just takes longer and longer to get there. Yeah, it gets there.
And maybe one of the dynamics has been really interesting in the model throughout that the year is the large customer growth has still been very robust. That in the last three quarters of each been the largest net new additions into the million dollar plus spenders. Could you take in with us a little bit about the sort of the life cycle of that million dollar plus customer? How long did it take them to get there? I think the average million dollar plus customer now is like 3.7, 3.7, 3.7. Three point seven. Like, what's the long as it take them from when they cross a million to get to sort of like that average? So, you know, when we sign up a new customer, a global 2000 is a little over 100 grand is what they start at. A normal non-global 2000s in the 50 to 60 thousand a year and they quickly grow it usually will take a global 2000 to get that million dollars two to three years to get there. Why? Because some get there much faster, but they generally move pretty slow these companies. Got it.
Well, I want to shift gears to the margin side of the equation because that was the other really pretty spectacular part of the equation if you look back at calendar 2022. Consumption models aren't supposed to see expanding margins as growth flows down. It should be harder for you guys to grow margins. So, first of all models are mechanically geared that when growth flows down, you could just see more margins.
But you guys have a really robust expansion in your overall free cash flow margins during 2022. How are you able to do that? And if the demand environment gets better and the consumption picks up, shouldn't that be incremental even sort of more positive from margins on and go forward business?
So, we've been, I've been with the company enough for a little over three and a half years and since day one, I remember that first year when I joined, we were expected to burn 220 million and we'll quickly turn that around. We've always been focused on free cash flow and I would say it's revenue growth, product margins, and free cash flow. And you know, it's pretty simple math. As to how that's working, we continue to show product margin improvements. We continue to show operating margin improvements.
I will say what's kind of surprised me is I was expecting early on more of a shift in payment terms with our customers. Most of our customers still, they signed a three-year contract or one-year contract and passed annually in advance. 80% plus of our customers still do that. I have expected customers to want to move to quarterly or monthly payment plans. Why? Because the cloud vendors give everyone monthly payment terms and that is an option to customers. We give them that option, but it's all about discounting and they would rather get a higher discount and pay up front.
I do think with people earning real returns on cash balances overnight now that there will be a shift in that and that's one of the reasons why we kept our free cash flow flat at 25% next year. That's one piece but then also we got some surprise early payments in January that I wasn't expecting that influence that made that free cash flow higher in Q4 than it otherwise would have been.
One other thing I want to make sure we touch on we have about a minute left is the expansion of the AWS relationship. AWS, obviously a major infrastructure partner for you guys as well, but you've well expanded that relationship. It's not just being in the market place. There's go to market commitments being made on both sides of the equation.
You dig in a little bit about that of what you and Amazon are now doing together on on and go to market. Sure. We have committed head count out of AWS aligned to our verticals globally as well. We're committing head count to Matt, we've had those head count anyways, but we're matching our head count as well too on the on the alliance side. There's more dollars that are committed for migration funds to a snowflake on AWS.
There's a lot more free credits. There's a lot of POCs that we run when those POCs could be a new customer, but then also when we're looking at doing snow park, we offer free credits to customers to do e-vails. That stuff is funded by the cloud guys. We fund some of it and they're willing to make the throw money in. It's a pretty big financial commitment. We're making a big financial commitment to them. They're making a big financial commitment to us as well too.
It also promotes AWS is really good about everyone thinks you compete with AWS Redshift. They're going to they talk about all these product improvements. The reality is, in large accounts, AWS partners with us out of the gate because they want to see those customers land in AWS. History has shown that snowflake helps those customers land in AWS. That's good for AWS because they can sell a lot of other software services around snowflake.
That's standing. Unfortunately that takes us to end of our lot of times a lot, but Mike Christian, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having us. Bye.