Databricks, Snowflake, GCP, & Public Cloud Competition

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I think they missed the window of opportunity there, and now they'll probably be private for a very long time. You know BigQuery very, very well. I might be reading between the lines here, but it sounded like you don't think BigQuery is competitive against Databricks and Snowflake. Why do you think that is?

Because Google is not getting entry into large enterprises yet. It's ugly, and we were one of the first ones to come in, then they brought in TK, next phase. So Amit Singh and the team didn't quite get enterprise well when they tried to do it. I came in under Amit Singh's regime, but then Diane came, and it started to move more towards enterprise. It's still a distant number three in enterprise. People are going to pick AWS and Azure first, and what happens then is you're not going to pick BigQuery simply because GCP is last. You can argue that BigQuery has nothing to do with GCP but yes, it has everything to do with it, it's going to run on GCP, but you can get just BigQuery if you're looking at it from their perspective. But nobody's going to do that. No CIO is going to go out and buy it for any company that does a billion or over in revenue. Mid-market might, but mid-market has many other problems to deal with than to deal with multiple vendors.

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Yes, that’s a great way to explain it. Between Databricks and Snowflake, then, looking at the two of them, do you have a feel for which architecture will be a more significant market long-term? Do you think Databricks is a more prominent company in 10 years, or do you think Snowflake is?

Sometime back, I think when at Google, they were a little stuck. I brought them back in at Google to sort of move the partnership with Google further along. That was in the early days when they didn't have as much Google attention. I helped catalyze that. But he came in, took the call, brought the people, and I saw him in action. Phenomenal respect. However, I don't think he's a Frank Slootman. Now putting things in perspective, I do believe Snowflake will run a tighter business. If it's an Oracle SAP comparison, I would say Snowflake might be the Oracle, and Databricks might be the SAP; they both have done well. I don't know if this answers your question; I'm just giving you a data point.

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I hear you loud and clear. Last question around the data infrastructure market. When I asked about at the beginning, which customers you were most optimistic about, you jumped to Databricks and Snowflake. I guess that’s a statement about the size of the market there. What do you think about that? Why are you so optimistic about this market?

After all the changes we made at a large bank, I'm going to put a number out that we managed to get 5% of it off to the cloud. There's a whole lot of data and everything, and we had our own data lakes and lakes upon lakes and a bunch of different things, so consolidation has to happen even for people who've built all this stuff on-premise. I'm not sure what numbers Databricks and Snowflake are now projecting in the cloud market, but I would say if they're putting a B behind it, they're wrong. It probably needs more of a T behind it; it’s in the trillions.

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