By: Tom Christensen, Head of Thought Leadership - Nordics, LTIMindtree

In the first week of June 2024, San Francisco experienced an extraordinary event of snowfall. It was the perfect moment to bring out the Polarsled and start enjoying the magnificent hills of the city. The Snowflake Summit 2024 took place at the Moscone Center, where over 20,000 data professionals gathered to illuminate AI and showcase how to extract insights and information in a data-driven world. This year, the emphasis was on all things data, AI and apps.

The annual data gathering

The Snowflake Summit is an annual conference that gathers data professionals from across the globe for a week of networking, learning, sharing experiences, and gaining insights into the latest innovations Snowflake has developed over the past year. These summits typically set the stage for the upcoming year by unveiling new features and inspiring attendees to consider how to incorporate them seamlessly into their data solutions. This year was no different.

Future direction

The future track was laid out a couple of years ago, and now it is time to accelerate Generative AI ​​and large language models (LLM). This trend has been significant since ChatGPT was first released in late 2022. I was eager to see how Generative AI would be integrated into the Data Cloud, and how native apps, use cases, and industry solutions could benefit from this innovative technology.

Keynote insights

We were not disappointed. The keynotes centered on AI enhancements like Snowflake Cortex and Arctic, and support for NVIDIA in the compute layer. These services make it faster and easier to incorporate AI and LLM into Enterprise AI Data Cloud Services, ultimately increasing the speed of building AI, Apps for monetizaton. These apps, designed to address customer pain points through defined use cases, drive innovation and meet evolving needs. Focusing on use cases and industry solutions benefits everyone.

Elevate creativity with Cortex

Cortex for Generative AI by Snowflake hosts and serves industry-leading AI models, LLMs, and vector functions. It enables efficient content creation through advanced generative algorithms, offering businesses a modern approach to enhance their creative processes. This service now features embedded LLM functions, making it easier, faster, and more secure to analyze data and build native apps powered by AI in minutes, bypassing the traditional, time-consuming process of building AI Apps or using costly external ones. This advancement greatly benefits the enhancement of native apps within organizations. 

Cost-efficient LLM launch

Snowflake Arctic launched an enterprise-centric LLM using an open-source license to enhance cost efficiency. This model is now available in Cortex, giving instant access to industry-leading LLMs trained by researchers at companies like Mistral, Reka, Meta, and Google, including Snowflake Arctic. The product was well received and garnered considerable attention from the delegates. Using this new LLM service requires limited skills and setup. Your data stays within Snowflake, providing the performance, scalability, and governance you expect.

Native apps are reshaping tech landscape

Native apps are transforming the world, impacting many sectors beyond just changing how we engage with technology. By utilizing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data and applying sophisticated AI algorithms and analytics, these applications deliver tailored experiences, precise forecasts, automated operations, and foster innovation beyond what traditional ERP applications could achieve.

Snowflake’s application strategy

Last year, Snowflake transformed the data landscape by introducing a novel concept: bringing applications directly to the data. This approach enables customers to create, distribute, deploy, operate, and even monetize applications seamlessly within the secure data cloud environment. By incorporating Snowpark Container Services into a Snowflake native app, developers can craft and share complex full-stack applications that operate entirely within the end user’s Snowflake account, providing a comprehensive and streamlined development experience.

Key benefits and added value

1. Enhanced data security and IP protection
2. Monetization opportunities on Snowflake marketplace
3. Seamless access to leading logical data models (LLMs)
4. Simplified deployment and reduced complexity

In essence, Snowflake’s strategy not only simplifies application development but also accelerates the transition from development to production, promoting a dynamic and agile ecosystem within the data cloud.

Overcoming governance challenges

Snowflake is accelerating its development of the Horizon platform, which offers data governance services focusing on compliance, security, privacy, and access control as one unified loop. This helps users manage data assets effectively through a unified set of capabilities while ensuring interoperability and scalability within the Snowflake ecosystem. Many customers have indicated that technology is no longer the primary hurdle to success. All features are now available within weeks through the Data Cloud Service from Snowflake. Instead, the challenges lie in broken internal processes and inefficient data governance. 

Polaris Catalog

The announcement of Polaris Catalog signifies a big step towards embracing open standards and enhancing data interoperability. Polaris Catalog is an open-source community catalog designed for data stored in the Apache Iceberg format. This move aims to provide interoperability with Apache Iceberg, offering a vendor-neutral approach to managing and accessing data. The introduction of Polaris Catalog at the Snowflake Summit 2024 highlights Snowflake’s commitment to open data practices and fostering collaboration within the data community.

LTIMindtree in the stand area

During the event, we showcased many of our industry solutions that can run on Snowflake AI Data Cloud such as our manufacturing solution – ManufacturingNxt, Redar, Money in motion etc. We also showcased our native apps for FinOps, now available for free download on Snowflake’s Marketplace.

To showcase our journey, we introduced the “Action to Impact: Speed and Scale Stories” series. This initiative includes 106 impactful case studies that have been successfully implemented. These stories demonstrate our dedication to supporting, sharing, and inspiring organizations with what is possible with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

This shows how LTIMindtree uses data to solve complex business problems using Generative AI and machine learning (ML) on Snowflake, leveraging Cortex, Arctic, Snowpark, and Streamlit.

Snowflake’s strategy is in line with our data strategy. Our theme for this event is:

• Unify: your data (All data workloads)
• Simplify: your decisions (Make intelligent decisions with AI & ML)
• Amplify: your success (with industry apps)

One of our unique offerings is Fosfor, our product suite that accelerates the journey from raw data to actionable insights with AI capabilities, and maximizing outcomes by increasing actionable insights.

PolarSled is another unique offering that accelerates Snowflake cloud migration by up to 60 to 70%. This platform serves as a holistic solution tailored for a smooth transition to Snowflake cloud, focusing on migration, automated analysis, code conversion, governance, and data-driven transformations. It is supported by native Global Information Tracker (GIT) and DevOps integration for enhanced efficiency.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Snowflake has evolved beyond being a Data Cloud to an AI Data Cloud, emphasizing the acceleration of native app development and creating increased value for businesses. This is a promising move for Snowflake.

Additionally, the networking aspect of the event has become paramount for me. Connecting with individuals for seamless knowledge sharing provides opportunities for both business and casual conversations. Many attendees had the privilege of meeting product managers in person to discuss the latest features or interact with customers presenting case studies during the day.

Reference links

LTIMindtree Fosfor

LTIMindtree PolarSled

LTIMindtree Canvas.ai

LTIMindtree PolarSled FinOps – Native Apps avaiable on Snowflake Marketplace

LTIMindtree PolarSled Accelerate Data Modernization to Snowflake

Snowflake Cortex

Snowflake Arctic

Snowflake Horizon