Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Snowflake drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

We recently published three Ventana Research 2023 Data Platforms Value Indexes, which evaluate technology vendors and products that provide individual and combined analytic and operational data platform support. At Ventana Research, we continue to believe that, for most use cases, there is a clear choice between analytic and operational data platforms to best meet your organization’s needs. We developed three technology assessment and buyers’ guides to focus on overall data platform requirements as well as specific analytic data platform and operational data platform use cases.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. For each of the Value Indexes, we evaluated Snowflake and other vendors in seven categories: five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our market research, including our Benchmark Research on Analytics and Data.

Snowflake has been one of the fastest-growing vendors in the analytic data platforms sector since it was founded in 2012 to create a cloud-based analytic database platform. The company has added data integration, data science and machine learning (ML), and data marketplace capabilities to its data cloud managed service. As Snowflake is focused specifically on analytic data workloads, it was only included in our Analytic Data Platforms Value Index.

In the Analytic Data Platforms Value Index, Snowflake was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 13th overall in this Value Index evaluation. It ranked 13th in Product Experience, where it ranked best in Reliability. It ranked 10th in Customer Experience and ranked best in the Validation category. Its overall performance was impacted by its lower rankings in the Usability and Adaptability categories, which represent 25% of the weighting in the overall Value Index. Our assessment finds that Snowflake could perform better in Adaptability, where it ranked 13th, by making improvements in user and process integration. In Capability, where it ranked 13th, Snowflake could make improvements in relation to core database and database administrator functionality.

This assessment was based on Snowflake’s data platform products generally available as of September 30, 2022.

Organizations should evaluate their data platform requirements for operational and analytic workloads to ensure the existing products and vendors are meeting their needs. If their current data platforms are not satisfying those requirements, they should consider whether Snowflake can help meet their needs.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of data platforms in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Click below to read the individual reports:

Data Platforms Value Index

Analytic Data Platforms Value Index

Operational Data Platforms Value Index