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HP Offers to Acquire Poly

On March 28, HP announced an offer of $3.3 billion to acquire integrated communications vendor Poly. Poly, created from the merger of Plantronics and Polycom, acquiring @PolyCompany is interesting because both firms have a long history of supporting remote and home offices. Both companies have dealt with the challenges of the digital office. But this acquisition hints at a potential split for HP.

HP is obviously known as a printer company and printer ink prices ($3,000 per gallon) make even the most expensive gas pumps look like amazing bargains. But HP also has its Z by HP workstation brand, which is well-aligned to the Poly portfolio. It would be great to see that combined Poly/Z portfolio come together as the future of the digital office and to create that new “office in a box” or “office in a browser” that is always a goal for tech companies. There are still a few gaps in the portfolio, though.

The starting point is good spatial audio. As Poly has known since its telepresence days, 2 big secrets to optimal video conferencing are life-sized video and spatial audio. Both are hardware accessory issues: camera & speakers. Poly is great at the former, so-so at the latter. To take this a step further, HP Poly can be the smart accessory (and maybe even the programmable accessory) company providing all of the accessories beyond the phone and PC to support a better office, but this also requires continued API investment. Poly could have been the smart watch & VR headset company, but didn’t keep up. The opportunity is still there if Poly takes the immersive home office seriously and provides the one-stop shop for transforming the kitchen/guest bedroom/garage/remote office room into a communications hub.

And all that video and audio data is an obvious fit with the #datascience @ZbyHP portfolio. So, if all this makes sense, what is the issue?

Printer Ink.

For HP to pursue this path, it must embrace a business model path with one eye towards the actual Metaverse: VR, AR, workflow digitization, & eliminating the need for print. Z/Poly provides an obvious set of next steps: smart accessories, continued growth of the developer community, process automation & workflow orchestration Printers can be a part of this future if they are “iPhoned” to support higher dpi & eliminate the need for constant ink but anybody who has ever tried to implement a printer from scratch knows just how prehistoric this experience is compared to the mobile, SaaS, Big Data world that is pervasive in our consumer lives where even our refrigerators and light bulbs are now able to give us recommendations.

Does HP have the stomach to truly disrupt itself over the next decade, as Netflix wiped out its mail business & destroyed the value of its DVD library? Or will it spin out Z/Poly to maximize value? Or will Poly become a cash cow held back by legacy HP? HP now has more tools to truly reinvent the digital home office when remote employees can dip into the real estate budget. It will be fairly clear within this calendar year which of these three options ends up being HP’s true intentions: wither, cash cow, or innovate.

For the sake of the innovative geniuses who have worked at Plantronics and Poly love the years, I really hope their technology gets a chance to reach the next level. And as an analyst, I look forward to seeing what big brains @blairplez @DaveMichels @zkerravala have to say about this proposed acquisition as I have found their guidance and perspective invaluable over the years as an analyst who has dabbled in their market.

From a Technology Expense Management perspective, the big takeaway here is that the telecom environment is going farther and farther away from the dedicated phone systems and now even mobile devices that have traditionally been the hub of voice and video. HP’s acquisition of Poly will be part of a trend of creating more focused home office solutions as the future of the hybrid workplace requires less investment in 100,000 square foot (10,000 square meter) headquarters spaces and more investment in the 20 square feet (2 square meters) that we choose to work in at any given point. These accessories will require purchasing and tracking just as all business assets require and may have additional connectivity or computational support demands over time just as smartwatches, connected Internet of Things devices, and devices using edge computing require. Connected devices belong in a unified endpoint management solution, but this HP acquisition may start leading to some questions as to whether remote office management is part of a managed print strategy, enterprise mobility strategy, or general IT asset strategy. Amalgam Insights recommends that remote office tech investment, which will eventually match enterprise mobility as a $2,000/employee/year total cost of ownership for all relevant hybrid and home employees, should be handled as part of an enterprise mobility strategy where device management and logistics have already been defined.

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March 25: From BI to AI (Astronomer, C3 AI, Datagen, Dataiku, Datakin, Domino, HEAVY.AI, Hex, Informatica, NVIDIA, Snorkel AI, Talend)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding (and an Acquisition)

Astronomer Raises $213 Million Series C and Acquires Datakin; Scales Operations Amid Booming Growth and Global Demand
On March 23, data orchestration platform Astronomer announced that it had raised a $213M Series C round. Insight Partners led the round, with participation from JP Morgan, K5 Global, Meritech Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Venrock. The funding will be used for hiring in engineering and Customer Success, scaling up go-to-market operations, and R+D. Astronomer also revealed in the same announcement that it had acquired Datakin, a data lineage solution, and will be integrating it into Astronomer.

Datagen Obtains $50 Million in Series B Funding

Datagen, a synthetic data generator for computer vision systems, announced March 23 that it had closed $50M in Series B funds. Scale Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Spider Capital, TLV Partners, and Viola Ventures. As part of the transaction, Scale Venture Partners’ Andy Vitus joins Datagen’s board of directors.

Hex Raises $52M Series B

On March 22, Hex, a collaborative data science and analytics platform, announced that it had raised a $52M Series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Additional participants included new investors Snowflake and Databricks, as well as existing investors Amplify Partners and Redpoint. Funding will go towards hiring and research and development.

Product Launches and Updates

C3 AI Version 8 to Accelerate the Development of Enterprise AI Applications – C3 AI

On March 23, C3 AI announced that C3 AI Application Platform Version 8 was now generally available. Key features of the newest release include additional pre-built and extensible AI apps for supply chain planning and execution within C3 AI Applications; C3 AI Virtual Data Lake, a way to aggregate an organization’s data into one image to mitigate the need to replicate said data for analytics and AI processing; C3 AI Data Vision, which enables AI-driven knowledge graphs to facilitate more advanced data visualization and AI discovery; C3 AI Studio, a low-code AI app development environment; and C3 AI Ex Machina, a no-code machine learning canvas.

Domino Data Lab Announces NVIDIA Fleet Command Support
Domino Data Lab announced new integrations with NVIDIA in the wake of GTC 2022. Domino now supports NVIDIA Fleet Command, permitting model deployment on edge devices. In addition, Domino’s Enterprise MLOps platform is now available through NVIDIA LaunchPad, a way to run pilot projects to assess appropriate purchase decisions for data projects.

HEAVY.AI Introduces Version 6.0

On March 22, HEAVY.AI announced a limited release of HEAVY.AI 6.0. Key new capabilities include HeavyConnect, a way to analyze and visualize an organization’s data wherever it is without moving or copying it; performance improvements for HeavyDB and HEAVY.AI overall; an admin panel for Heavy Immerse providing thorough oversight of existing deployments; and in beta, the ability to integrate machine learning models into the analytics workflow, both in Heavy Immerse and by SQL queries. HEAVY AI 6.0 will be generally available in April.

Informatica Launches Vertical-Specific IDMC for Retail
On March 24, Informatica announced the Intelligent Data Management Cloud for Retail, focusing on retail-specific challenges in data fragmentation and the complexity of a multi-cloud hybrid environment. Spotlighted issues addressed include upgrades to data governance and privacy capabilities, improving inventory visibility and demand forecasting capabilities, and enabling customers to provide more personalized shopping experiences.

NVIDIA AI Improves on Speech, Recommender System and Hyperscale Inference Capabilities
At GTC 2022, NVIDIA announced updates to its NVIDIA AI Platform. These updates include improvements to NVIDIA Triton, a model inference solution; NVIDIA Riva, a speech AI SDK; NVIDIA NeMo Megatron, a training framework for large language models; NVIDIA Merlin, a recommendation AI; and NVIDIA Maxine, an audio and video enhancement SDK. In addition, NVIDIA released AI Enterprise 2.0, with certification for Red Hat Open Shift, allowing customers to use containerized machine learning tools across a variety of data centers and cloud platforms.

Snorkel AI Announces Snorkel Flow
Snorkel AI announced that Snorkel Flow, its AI platform with automated labeling, was now generally available. Snorkel Flow key features include programmatic data labeling; a no-code machine learning modeling suite; workflows to improve training data quality, and for domain experts to provide input on data labeling; and templates for document classification and extraction.

Talend Data Catalog 8 Updates Focus on Data Compliance
On March 24, Talend announced the availability of Talend Data Catalog 8, part of its Talend Data Fabric platform. New capabilities in this release include automated data classification to classify data around things like compliance violations; the ability to export data lineage and transformation logic via APIs to meet compliance requests; and tailored business modeling to define domain meta models that most accurately match business priorities.

Hiring

Dataiku Brings Aboard Adam Towns as CFO

On March 23, Dataiku announced that they had hired Adam Towns as their Chief Financial Officer. Towns, well-experienced in tech finance, joins Dataiku from Sisense, where he was the CFO, leading their global finance and business operations team. Prior to that, Towns was the Senior VP of Strategic Finance and FP&A at Mimecast, where he brought the company through its IPO, increasing revenue by 15x and headcount by 20x during his tenure there.

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March 18: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Databricks, DataRobot, Dataiku, Domino Data Lab, H2O.ai, Microsoft Azure, Redis, Salesforce, Snowflake, Synthetaic, Tecton)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Featured: Healthcare Data Announcements During HIMSS22

In the wake of Databricks rolling out its healthcare-specific data lakehouse last week, along with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference (HIMSS22) happening this week, several other enterprises made healthcare data-related announcements in the last few days.

H2O.ai Reveals Portfolio of Healthcare AI Apps

On March 11, H2O.ai announced an expansion of its healthcare data capabilities, offering 40 AI applications within Population Health, Precision Medicine, Public Health, and Intelligent Supply Chain. Notable apps include a COVID-19 hospital occupancy simulator, COVID-19 forecasting, a gene mutation risk assessment app, and a route optimizer app for supply chain support for health manufacturers.

Microsoft Announces General Availability of Azure Health Data Services, Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

On March 15, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Health Data Services, along with improvements for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Key features of Azure Health Data Services include the ability to securely transfer protected health information (PHI) in the cloud, along with connecting it to other apps within the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Notable relevant updates to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include Text Analytics for Health to improve clinical and operational insights by extracting insights from unstructured medical data and transforming it into Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format.

Salesforce Announces Improvements to Customer 360 For Health
On March 16, Salesforce announced new capabilities within Salesforce’s Customer 360 for Health. Of note on the data side, Salesforce debuted Patient Unified Health Scoring to provide insights into best courses of action for a given patient, integrated with the Patient Data Platform, allowing medical data to be appropriately connected while respecting HIPAA and other regulations and governance.

Snowflake Launches Healthcare & Life Sciences Data Cloud

On March 17, Snowflake launched its Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud, aiming to eliminate data silos and allow for appropriate sharing and use of sensitive medical data while respecting regulations and governance. Key features include enhanced data governance, the ability to ingest and run analytics on HL7/FHIR messages, and support for analyzing numerous types of unstructured medical data.

Funding

Synthetaic Secures $13M Series A Financing

Synthetaic, an AI-based image classifier, has raised $13M in Series A funding. Lupa Systems led the round, with additional participation from Betaworks, Booz Allen Hamilton, Esri, and TitleTown Tech. The funding will be used for hiring, R+D, and strategic partnerships.

Product Launches and Updates

DataRobot AI Cloud 8.0 Now Available

On March 17, DataRobot debuted AI Cloud 8.0. Key enhancements include support for Automated Time Series in DataRobot’s AI App Builder, the availability of Continuous AI in on-prem environments, and new integrations with Microsoft Active Directory and Scoring Code for Snowflake. AI Cloud 8.0 is available now.

Dataiku Debuts Cloud Stack Accelerator on AWS

On March 16, Dataiku revealed their no-code cloud stack accelerator on AWS. The accelerator is a way to rapidly deploy and manage Dataiku on AWS, bringing together Amazon and Dataiku resources for machine learning projects. Notable capabilities in the partnership include the ability to connect, transform, and analyze datasets hosted on Amazon Redshift within Dataiku; build and scale Dataiku AutoML machine learning models running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service; and include computer vision and text analytics within Dataiku projects using AWS’ machine learning services.

Partnerships

Alteryx Updates Partner Program

Alteryx announced its updated partner program, marking a shift in its go-to-market strategy to emphasize the acceleration partners can provide in implementing analytics projects. Notable changes include three new tiers for partners (Registered, Select, and Premier), standardized benefits that increase with partner-initiated projects, a new role-based training curriculum and certifications, and global guidelines for engagement.

Databricks Introduces Brickbuilder Solutions, Extending Its Partner Program

Databricks established Brickbuilder Solutions, an extension of its partner program. Brickbuilder Solutions includes a number of consultants who have built solutions on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, helping their clients accelerate their data-driven digital transformation projects.

Tecton and Redis Integrate for Realtime Feature Store Access

Tecton, an enterprise feature store, and Redis, a realtime data platform, announced a partnership late last week. Tecton has integrated its feature store with Redis Enterprise Cloud to provide customers realtime feature serving for high-volume, low-latency use cases such as approving credit card transactions or fraud detection.

Hiring

Domino Data Lab Welcomes Former Microsoft Chief Data Analytics Officer John Kahan as Advisor

Domino Data Lab has welcomed John Kahan as a strategic advisor to their CEO and Board of Directors. Kahan will provide guidance on go-to-market and product development. Most recently, Kahan was the Chief Data Analytics Officer at Microsoft, where he held numerous roles in the data space over nearly the past two decades. Kahan also serves on several other companies’ boards and as an advisor to predictive analytics company Equinauts, petroleum and renewable energy company US Venture, and the Novartis Foundation to advise on AI in public health, intersecting with markets of interest to Domino.

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March 11: From BI to AI (Anodot, Appen, Atlan, Collibra, Databricks, Mindtech, Oracle, Snowflake, Vyasa, Xata)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Product Updates

Databricks Debuts Lakehouse for the Healthcare and Life Sciences Industries

On March 9, Databricks rolled out its latest industry-specific lakehouse, this time for healthcare and life sciences. Healthcare and life sciences data have particular issues around data silos and a lack of format standardization, along with the usual complications around combining structured and unstructured data for analysis, making it difficult to analyze said data at scale. Migrating data to a data lake such as Databricks’ Lakehouse will enable more complex and nuanced analysis of medical data, allowing for better understanding of patients, hospital capacity, disease spread, and other medical concepts. Amalgam Insights’ Hyoun Park goes into further detail in TechTarget. Databricks Lakehouse for Healthcare and Life Sciences follows previous industry-specific lakehouse releases for Financial Services, and for Retail and Consumer Goods.

Collibra Extends Data Intelligence Cloud with New Capabilities

On March 9, Collibra, X, announced significant updates to its Data Intelligence Cloud. New capabilities include automatic validation rules in Collibra Data Quality and Observability to scale up enforcement of data quality and sensitive data discovery, new Data Quality workflows to prioritize data quality requests appropriately, automation of data curation for data stewards, and improved data visualization. In addition, considerable attention was given to integrations, with expanded support for Tableau and new support for Matillon, as well as a new browser extension providing context for data when viewing Tableau and PowerBI reports, among a number of other popular data sources.

Vyasa Launches Cortex for Visual Data Fabric Creation and Management

Vyasa, a deep learning and analytics software provider, debuted Cortex, a data fabric management platform, this week. Cortex functions as a template builder for data fabrics by allowing users to build, manage, and provision access to data sources that are connected to Vyasa’s Layar data fabrics, thus creating new data fabric instances. Data fabrics keep disparate data silos connected within a given project, and Layar uses deep learning to tag and catalog the data to enable easy search capabilities; Cortex then provides a business-user-friendly interface to manage the projects.

Funding

Atlan Raises $50M Series B

On March 9, Atlan, a data collaboration platform, announced that it had closed a $50M Series B funding round. Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital India co-led the round, with additional participation from Waterbridge Ventures and individual investors in the data space. The funding will go towards hiring throughout the company and expediting Atlan’s go-to-market strategy, as well as allowing for a potential ESOP buyback of up to $1.5M.

Xata Raises $30M to Launch a User-Friendly Serverless Database

Xata, a user-friendly serverless database service for developers, announced earlier this week that it had raised a $30M Series A round of financing from Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The funding will go towards product development. Xata also revealed that it had formed its board of directors, all women – an appropriate announcement for International Women’s Day on March 8. The board consists of CEO and Xata founder Monica Sarbu, Redpoint’s Erica Brescia as the director of the board, and Index’s Erin Price-Wright as a board observer.

Oracle Announces Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Financial Results

On March 10, Oracle announced its Q3 2022 fiscal results. Revenues matched expectations, but earnings came in slightly below expectations. One potential contributing factor is that two of Oracle’s investments are underperforming – chip maker Ampere Computing had an operating loss, and gene sequencing company Oxford Nanopore has seen its stock price cut in half since the beginning of the year. These actually highlight two key trends. First, with the ongoing supply chain issues, large tech companies want to have more control over their ability to make and sell relevant hardware going forward, and recent geopolitical issues will exacerbate this trend further. Second, in addition to investing heavily enough in Oxford Nanopore that it affected their bottom line, Oracle also announced its intention to buy health record management software company Cerner for $28B. IBM may be getting out of healthcare, but Oracle seems eager to jump into the fray.

Partnerships

Appen Partners with, Invests in Synthetic Data Business Mindtech

On March 10, Appen, a data annotation platform, and Mindtech, a computer vision-centric synthetic data creation platform, announced a commercial partnership between the two companies. Appen and Mindtech will provide both real and synthetic images, along with contextualized data and metadata annotation services, to encourage adoption of synthetic data in training AI models. As part of the investipartnership, Appen has also invested $3.7M to accelerate Mindtech’s growth.

Anodot Partners with Snowflake’s Data Cloud

On March 7, Anodot announced that it had joined the Snowflake Partner Network. Anodot provides anomaly detection and alerting, specializing in time series data. Joint customers of Anodot and Snowflake will be able to monitor this high-volume, high-frequency data collected in Snowflake for near-real-time insights.

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March 4: From BI to AI (Alteryx, Databricks, Datametica, Dremio, Informatica, KX, Microsoft, Snowflake, Stardog, Streamlit)

If you would like your announcement to be included in Amalgam Insights’ weekly data and analytics roundups, please email lynne@amalgaminsights.com.

Funding and Financials

Snowflake Reports Q4 and 2022 Fiscal Year Financial Results

Snowflake announced their full-year and Q4 financial results this week. Product revenue was nearly $360M in Q4, representing 102% year-over-year growth, while for the full year, product revenue was over $1.1B at 106% growth YOY. Despite more than doubling revenues, Snowflake’s stock plunged nearly 15% following this announcement because this level of revenue growth failed to meet market expectations.

Amalgam’s Insight: Snowflake’s expectations for growth are so high that it can grow at nearly unprecedented rates and still “lose value” from a stock perspective. In considering Snowflake’s financial viability in the solution selection process, look at Snowflake’s raw financials metrics, which bascially show that the company is doubling year over year at a 65% gross margin, rather than the fluctuations of its stock price.

Product Launches and Enhancements

Alteryx Announces Alteryx Analytics Cloud

On March 1, Alteryx debuted the Alteryx Analytics Cloud, unifying Alteryx Designer Cloud and Alteryx Machine Learning with its recent acquisitions of Trifacta Data Engineering and Hyper Anna, now called Alteryx Auto Insights. Alteryx users will now have access to the full Analytics Cloud suite via a web browser in addition to the existing Desktop and on-prem solutions.

Amalgam’s Insight: The Analytics Cloud provides a comprehensive packaging option for potential Alteryx customers to purchase all of Alteryx’s major capabilities. This suite also provides companies with a toolkit to support both data analysts and data scientists across the cleansing, modeling, automation, and insight-related activities  associated with machine learning as Alteryx continues to expand its role in the enterprise data, analytics, and machine learning world.

Dremio Debuts Dremio Cloud on AWS, Along With Additional Services

Dremio released Dremio Cloud, a free data lakehouse platform, this week on AWS, along with two new services: Dremio Sonar and Dremio Arctic. Dremio Sonar allows companies to run BI directly on lakehouse data without needing to export it anywhere, while Dremio Arctic, a metadata and data management service for Apache Iceberg, allows users to “version” data workflows the way software developers version source code. Dremio Cloud and Dremio Sonar are both generally available now, while Dremio Arctic is in public preview.

Amalgam’s Insight: Dremio is making good on its recent $160 million round of funding with new product capabilities at a time when the concept of the lakehouse, an analytic layer designed to support semi-structured data, is becoming mandatory in enterprise environments. Given the vast amounts of money being spent in the innovation and go-to-market strategies in this market, Amalgam Insights believes it is a market trend for lakehouse vendors to compete on freemium, managed services, and governance options that make the lakehouse cheaper, easier, and safer to deploy.

Informatica Introduces Intelligent Multi-Domain Master Data Management

On March 2, Informatica announced that they have added Intelligent Multi-Domain Master Data Management capabilities to their Intelligent Data Management Cloud, allowing customers to view and manage master data across multiple domains in a relational manner.

Amalgam’s Insights: Informatica continues to build on its market leadership in Master Data Management at a time when hybrid and multi-cloud management as well as regionalized data governance statutes make it increasingly difficult to rationalize master data at a multinational enterprise level. 

Stardog Reveals Stardog Designer in Latest Version

Stardog released version 7.9.0 of its platform, and revealed Stardog Designer, a no-code knowledge graph creation application within the platform. Stardog users will be able to create semantic data models using a visual interface, then easily export those models to flat files or to other apps within Stardog.

Amalgam’s Insight: Graph data provides one of the highest ROI use cases for enterprise analytics, but one of the biggest challenges to adoption has been the lack of internal skills associated with creating, managing, and analyzing the nodes and vertices that make up an enterprise graph. Stardog’s release provides companies with an opportunity to both build relevant graph models and to export the context and shape of these models to other applications as necessary. 

Acquisitions and Partnerships

Datametica Forms Strategic Partnership with Databricks

Datametica, a data migration company, has partnered with Databricks. Datametica customers will now be able to use the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to modernize their data warehouses and migrate them to the cloud. For Databricks, this provides yet another route for customers with on-prem data warehouses to more easily migrate said data sources to the cloud.

Amalgam’s Insight: Datametica’s experience has traditionally been in migrating data warehouses to Google BigQuery and Microsoft Azure. This partnership makes it easier to migrate more data into Databricks at a time when the lakehouse approach to enterprise data continues to gain popularity. Databricks already has over $800 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $1.6 billion H round in August of 2021

KX Enters Strategic Partnership Agreement with Microsoft Azure

FD Technologies has partnered with Microsoft to extend the reach of FD Technologies’ KX Insights streaming data analytics platform. KX Insights will be embedded into Microsoft Azure, and KX and Microsoft will work together to develop new applications and services for the financial services sector.

Amalgam’s Insight: The financial services sector is a target for all of the major cloud vendors, as this sector is highly dependent on technological performance to gain advantages. This partnership shows yet another example of a third-party solution running on Azure that competes against an Azure product (Azure Stream Analytics) with the understanding that the most important goal is to win in the sector rather than to maximize short-term deal size.

Snowflake Announces Intent to Acquire Streamlit to Empower Developers and Data Scientists to Mobilize the World’s Data – Snowflake

On March 2, Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Streamlit, an open-source data application creation platform. Streamlit users can already build data apps without needing front-end development expertise; with the Snowflake acquisition, access to trusted data will be easier. Snowflake users will in turn have access to a user-friendly app development platform.

Amalgam’s Insight: Snowflake has sold a vision to the public markets of being a one-stop shop for all things data and analytics. This $800 million investment in Streamlit provides Snowflake with a scalable rapid development platform to expose more Snowflake data to more users. Usability is a core competitive aspect of data, which includes visualization, natural language queries, machine learning, contextualized apps, and embedded analytics. This investment cost approximately 1% of Snowflake’s market capitalization, making it relatively easy to justify.