And to my right, of course, is Mr. Scarpelli, the CFO. And we'll start at the top, which is, well, first of all, how are you? I'm good. Can I say something before you do this? I have to tell you. I can't wait. I've been dealing with, this is actually the fifth public company I've been dealing with, analysts with callbacks for many, many years. And I have to tell you, Pat did something the other day that was the first. Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. He was unbelievable.
He actually had his son, who is a data scientist, who works at actually a customer of ours. Come on the call and ask all the questions of Christian at a technical level, which was, I've never, ever seen an analyst have their son do that. That tells me two things. A, you're old. Really old. I've known Pat for many years. And B, the value you get out of, really, if you're a data scientist, and you appreciate that. And hopefully you got something out of that that your son learned and you could appreciate the difference between snowflake and what others are doing out there. So I really did appreciate you doing that.
What is back then? Well, I also realized Pat's cheap because his house was so cold that his son has a jacket on and he has a jacket on too. So he wrote it to me. I wrote it down. I wrote it down. I'm not going to find it. I wrote down Zachary's reaction. I put it as a, as a, as a positive data point. So yeah, so I have a, we have four children, but three of them are hopefully no one's in there, son, they're around here somewhere. But three of them are normal, but one of them is just really, really off the charts. And he's a data scientist and he talks slow. Did you notice that? Yeah, he's very methodical. He's very, very, very, very slow, very slow. And so he would be pausing before asking the next question. I was like, oh my god, is there another question coming? Yeah, no. And then it was just like great. He has good questions. It was great. And he, so when I emailed you guys, I said I'm going to get my data science expert on. I didn't share it. It was. Yeah, so snowpark is a big deal. That was what I took away from the conversation was Zach. We'll get to that. So let's start with house business and then we'll go straight to snowpark after that.
Well, we just gave an update on the business last week and nothing's changed since then. Give me your characterization. You know, Q4, from a revenue standpoint, we pretty much hit our internal guidance from the beginning. And I say internal what we present to our board. And so it's where we expected it to be. What we did notice was different was the, our older customers seem to have contributed to more of the growth and the newer cohort are growing much slower. And we think that is a function of newer customers today as they're ramping on snowflake.
There's a lot more knowledge out there around people who have been working on snowflake for a period of time have learned the pitfalls of not deploying snowflake properly. The pitfalls have not put in place the proper governance. We have a lot more partners who are trained on how to implement snowflake properly. We are doing a lot more training with customers on how to use snowflake out of the gate. We have built a lot of capabilities within snowflake to ensure that people are using it properly.
Like auto suspend, it was always easy for people to, you spin up a warehouse. There's two things you want to do. You want to be able to select the right size warehouse. And it was easy for people to select a really large warehouse. It was easy for people to disable the auto suspend function. So A, you could be running a warehouse bigger than what you want. Now it's much harder to do that. We do that for you. We have all kinds of alerting when someone disables an auto suspend function so that people know that and there's questions, do you really want to do that? And B, people are just using snowflake more efficiently.
But I think two is the earlier customers were those digitally native customers that think of the instacarts in others of the world that were just born in the cloud that really it was growth at all costs. The cohort of customers we have now are the more established mature companies. I don't want to say they're the laggards or the late adopters, but they're not those necessarily the fastest moving companies. They've always had cost controls in place. And so we're seeing the newer cohorts just ramping more slowly.
They still all have the same end state they want to get to. They're just going to go at their pace in a very controlled fashion on controlling costs. Okay. So you predict the future, you were predicting the future based on cohorts and the new customers are actually not matching the same behavior as the older cohorts. Correct. That fair assessment.
And we were going through and spending a lot of time in the second half of January and February as we're rolling quota. You remember at the beginning of the year is when we have to roll quotas out by rep for the full year and we roll out consumption quota. There's a lot of discussion that happens between my finance team and the sales people on accounts. And that's where it became evident. A lot of those newer cohort of customers are just not growing at the same pace.
And I don't mean customers we landed three quarters ago. I'm talking the customers we've landed over the last one to three years are just growing slower. Over the last one to three years. How much slower are we talking about? Well, enough that I lowered the guidance to 40% growth next year. Which by the way is still good growth at the scale we're at. I'm not going to apologize for that type of growth.
What was it before? In the end of November, we were in our preliminary planning. We were thinking 47%. Yeah. Growth. Okay. So is an order of magnitude of what the cohorts are seeing? Is that a good indicator or is there something else in there? No. That's the layer next to the level of concern. Is there something on top of it? That's the biggest thing there.
Okay. And by the way, we're generally pretty good at forecasting consumption on an annual basis and I'll tell you, we had set our 2022 plan in February of 2022. We went to the board. We did miss that plan by 2%. I mean, full transparency. About 42 million dollars or whatever it was. And that was before you had Ukraine. That was before you had interest rates, that was before you had the crypto implosion. That was before at about 4%. About 4%. 2%. 2%. So I think we do pretty good. My point is I think we do pretty good job at forecasting.
Okay. So you peaked my interest when you started talking about the quotas. So how do the quotas work for your salespeople? Salespeople get two quotas. They get a growth quota and they get a consumption quota. And it could be anywhere from 50-50 to 50% of their pay. Their variable pay is based on growth, 50% on revenue. It could be as high as 90% on growth, 10% on revenue if you're truly a hunter going after new logos. Or it could be 10, 90, 10 on growth, 90% on consumption if you're just managing one of our top 10 accounts.
Do they complain that it's not fair to expect them as a, hey, just Mr. Salesperson, to be able to influence the consumption at some major bank, for example? They some complain, some don't. Some other really. They don't complain directly to me because they know what happens when they complain to me. But at the end of the day, though, they can influence it. You're absolutely wrong. What are the prime examples?
Here's a prime example. If they're out there and they're educating customers on actually how to use the product, how to use Snowpark, we're really spent, or last sales kickoff, on educating salespeople on how to go in and ask the right questions to customers to identify whether there's a Snowpark opportunity within that account, a Spark replacement, an ER, AMR, Cloudera, whatever. And they don't actually have to sell anything. They just need to educate the customer, get a customer using, and that will lead to a customer having to buy more capacity sooner. That's what we need our sales reps to do.
And by the way, AWS, Azure, and Google pay all the reps on revenue, not on bookings. I miss the significance of that. What we're doing is what is in the industry you're saying reps can't influence a customer on the channel. They all do that. That's how they're paying all the reps. Yeah, that's how they all did.
Okay, so let's shift to Snowpark, which honestly, I don't get nearly as well as I should. So this will be the opportunity. Well, if you don't get it, I'm probably not. I'm not as technical as your son. That's for sure.
Well, yeah. If only you were here. But so what was the opportunity with Snowpark that you felt like you were not capturing before? Spark workloads within data engineering. And what was happening is before we had Snowpark customers would take their data out of Snowflake, move it into another system. Run the Spark workloads and then move that data back into Snowflake. What's very expensive? Because you're paying to move that data by running it right within Snowflake.
You know exactly, A, you're not having to pay for moving the data, but B, you have this security and governance of Snowflake. Once you move your data outside of Snowflake, unless it's in a system that's highly secured and governed, you don't know what may happen to that data and where it could go. That's the big benefit to customers. And what are the very, what are the kind of workloads that you would take out of what's the kind of analysis that you would do in Spark that you wouldn't just be able to do in Snowflake?
You know, as I said, I'm not the technical person. I'm the technical person. I'm going to look at so hey, so hey, what are you doing in Spark that you would do in Snowflake? Analytics. Analytics. Analytics. Analytics of Snowflake all the time. That's what we do. Machine learning. Machine learning. Machine learning stuff. Exactly. Is that, is that, were they often doing it in Databricks? Databricks, open source Spark, Cloud era, EMR. Yeah. Okay.
So basically you had sort of the, it also enables you to write applications directly in Snowflake by having that. They tend to be heavily analytics applications. Right. Right. So basically we're talking about there's this machine learning opportunity, right? That you guys were not capturing as much of as you could. And in fact, it was worse, right? Because your customers would take the data out of Snowflake, put it somewhere else, and then there'd be all these inefficiencies in doing that.
When did Snowpark come out? For GA for Python just came out last quarter. And you really just pushed with the sales force at our sales kickoff in February? Yeah. So we're right there. I guess it's sort of, we've had it for Java and Scala earlier. But Python is the most common programming language that the data engineers want to use today.
Yeah. By the way, a little aside, so that, that, that kid that you're talking about, I'm like, exactly what's everyone using ChatGPT for? He goes, well, that, I wrote a program in Scala and I needed it to be, I think, at Python. And so I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it for me in Python. And I'm like, in that work, he goes, oh yeah, he submitted the code yesterday, he got accepted. Crazy. It is.
That's actually what we see as one of the biggest use cases for AI is really helping develop code. I'm still trying to figure out how ChatGTP itself is going to make money. And do you listen to this week's all-in podcast? No. No. I can't believe that I, that I recommend it. Honestly, it's so freaking good, right? And it's so good because that one guy is, is Dave Sacks is the head of venture firm. So that, however, you know, whatever, 40, 50 portfolio companies, and he just kind of tells you what he's seeing, right? Which is very rare to get a VC to do that, right? They're the whole things closer to the vest.
But anyways, yeah, this week's, this week's session is all about they're not sure either is the bottom line. They see where there's a lot of benefits coming to consumers, right? They're not so sure that that's not just going to get absorbed by, you know, the big tech players. They're not so sure either. It was interesting. There was a, it was well publicized. There was a Princeton grad student over a weekend. He wrote an application in streamlit using chat GTP to tell whether a, and a paper was machine generated or written by humans. You know, we've had over 8 million views. Yeah.
So we had this conversation in our 14 year old is like, yeah, why are all the teachers so freaked out at Redwood High School about this chat GPPT thing? What is it anyways? Right? And so we have the data scientists in the 14 year old at the table, right? And so Zachary goes, GGS chat GPPT, so she's in ninth grade. He says, well, he goes, what are you studying in school right now? And she goes, global warming. And he goes, ask chat GPPT to write a five paragraph, so chat GPP, write a five paragraph effort essay about global warming that's appropriate for a 10th grader. Yeah. Right? That's the beauty, right? That's appropriate for a 10th grader. And then the next example is even crazier.
So my wife is an author and she's got a bunch of articles on the web. And she was about to interview someone for a class that she's doing who is the CEO and female founder of a video game company. And it was write the interview questions that she should ask the CEO founder of the video game company in the voice of Samantha Parent, my wife. And she gets a little bossy when she's on this topic. There's a lot of moths and, you know, and so literally the questions come out in her voice. But how is that all going to benefit snowflake? I don't know.
So what we see happening, and I'm just going to, I'll call them large language models. Yeah. We're never going to be the one developing these large language models. Why to develop something like that is like it could be a hundred million in compute to develop these models.
But these models need to be fine tuned on real data. We have the data. So the big thing that we think is enabling those models to run directly on the data in snowflake is how we think we will benefit. So companies will take those large language models, they license and run it against their snowflake data for their business to fine tune the models for them. Right. That's how we believe.
What's interesting to us though is people to be able to write their own queries in snowflake using chat GTP to develop the queries. That's where are you seeing people do that? There's all kinds of YouTube videos around that. I give you a simple example. You want a query certain data and you want to write the code and Python. Some are to what you're saying but not convert it. Actually write the queries themselves. You can do. Wow. By the way, they're not always 100% accurate. No. They're to.
Okay. Cool. So let's go back to what you're seeing in the macro. So lengthening sales cycles. Sales cycles. All that stuff that everyone else is talking about. Sales cycles themselves. I've been saying since day one, these large global 2000 accounts are one to two to three year sales cycles. It really depends. But they all start small. We generally, when we land a global 2000, the average size is like a underground. It's not like they're big. It's their follow-on deals typically are bigger.
You can see anything changing there. What I do see is customers wanting and it's more with our existing customers where they've consumed faster than their contract rate. They want additional discounts. They want an economic benefit to do a new deal. If not, they're just going to continue to buy under their existing contract and we're just saying fine by under your existing contract. It's just buying capacity and that's what we saw. My largest customer just bought enough capacity to birds them through to March rather than do an annual contract.
Why? Because they can under their contract and they can continue to do that until July. But in July, they have to do something of equal to or greater than their old deal or they lose the discount they have. And so I'm hearing more and more customers wanting different payment terms. If you went back over a year ago, interest rates were virtually zero and holding cash wasn't a big deal today. You can earn 4.9% over an eight money.
Okay. We have five minutes. So let's open it up. I have a couple more. I want to ask you at the end. But let's open it up to any questions from our audience. There is no change in the competitive landscape. It continues to be Google BigQuery number one. It has been since the time we went public. Databricks is probably, I don't want to say number two because Microsoft I would say it would be number two. Databricks is the other one. And our whole snow park really goes directly at them. But the reality is they coexist in many of our accounts. Why we brought them into many of those accounts early on and we partnered with them. But it's definitely Google, I would say, is the most competitive.
In Google and Microsoft have the best, they can do a lot of bundling, which they do. Databricks doesn't have that pricing pressure that a Google or Microsoft can put on us. And by the way, we've been dealing with that for years with those guys offering stuff for free. And free isn't free. You've got to look at the total cost of ownership.
So the question was, what do I think about the public sector opportunity and when do we expect to have FedRAMP high certification? I expect to have FedRAMP high certification very soon. We've submitted everything and it's just waiting on the getting awarded that it could be, as far as I know it could be a week or it could be two or three months waiting on them. The public sector opportunity is only upside because they're pretty small. It's less than 1% of our business today.
I do think public sector in general, and I'm not just talking. The US is a big opportunity for us. I just came back from Korea and I was actually meeting with a consortium of companies that are advising the Korean government on their digital strategy and what they want to do. And this is going on around the world.
There are data sovereignty issues that we're working through, but UK is another good one there. But overall, public sector could be 10% of our business, but it's going to take some time to get there. We're doing very well within state and local section of government that doesn't require that FedRAMP high, but it almost seems like the goalpost to move where we thought FedRAM model was going to be enough and now they're saying no, they need FedRAMP high.
So hopefully it's very soon. And then IL-5 will be next. What's IL-5? It's another. I was sure it was. I was sure it was. Yes. IL-6 is, I don't think we'll ever get there, is probably the most rigorous.
I'm curious though, so when you say we're waiting back to hear from them, who's them? Is it like a particular department or is it out of their circle? What happens is you have to do all this stuff and demonstrate that you have all the controls and everything in procedures in place to operate in a FedRAMP high and then you literally handle your files over to a third party to do an audit and you need a sponsor within the government and we have a sponsor within the government that has to pay for that third party to do the audit of everything for them to sign off on.
Oh, is that how it works? Yes. They have to pay for it. It's a lot more than that. Yeah, but they have to pay for it. The sponsor has to pay for it. Yes. Interesting.
A minute and a half, what do you think investors don't get as well as they should about this story? You know, I can ask this question all the time. I thought I had the most original question. Is it not better or is it?
You know, I think in general, investors get it. I'm not going to say they don't get anything. I think a lot of people don't appreciate that how long some of these migrations are going to take with customers and that we have some customers that it's going to take them 10 years before they have all their data move to Snowflake because their on-prem data state is so big and they move so slow.
I think if you look at, and a lot of people think that we've been just a on-prem data warehouse migration, less than 20% of our businesses actually been these big on-prem data warehouses. We have a lot of new digitally native companies that were never a on-prem migration.
If you look at, we've signed up well over, I think it's over 1,500 on-prem data warehouse migrations of principally teradata and less than 100 of those customers have actually shut teradata down. Yeah. It's a long tail. Yeah. That is a durable opportunity.