ThoughtSpot unveils support for Snowflake developer platform
ThoughtSpot expanded its partnership with a leading data cloud provider, revealing ThoughtSpot for Snowpark to better enable developers as they work in-warehouse.
ThoughtSpot on Wednesday unveiled support for Snowpark, a developer experience from Snowflake currently in private preview.
Snowflake, a data cloud provider founded in 2012 and now based in Bozeman, Mont., introduced Snowpark in November 2020. When generally available, Snowpark will enable data scientists, data engineers and application developers to write code in the languages of their choice to execute workloads such as data preparation; extract, transform and load; and feature engineering directly in Snowflake.
Currently, customers have to write code in their own environments before loading workloads into Snowflake when finished. With ThoughtSpot for Snowpark, joint customers of ThoughtSpot and Snowflake will be able to combine the developer capabilities of Snowpark with the analytics capabilities of ThoughtSpot without leaving Snowflake's environment.
ThoughtSpot, an analytics vendor founded in 2012 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., already offers ThoughtSpot Everywhere, a low-code tool for application developers, but the integration with Snowflake's platform for developers will enable deeper data science within Snowflake using augmented intelligence and machine learning, according to Seann Gardiner, senior vice president of business development at ThoughtSpot.
"This allows us to tie into machine learning models executed inside of Snowpark and create AI applications," he said. "We feel like we have a differentiated interface through search and ease-of-use, but just creating a machine learning model doesn't mean you'll get value out of it. When you run those predictions closer to the data, like in Snowpark, action can be taken more quickly by the business."
Close partnership
ThoughtSpot for Snowpark, which is now generally available and will be available for use by ThoughtSpot customers as soon as Snowpark is out of preview, represents an extension of the already close relationship between ThoughtSpot and Snowflake.
In March 2021, ThoughtSpot sold a $20 million equity stake to Snowflake and, in 2019, the vendors unveiled a partnership that enabled joint users to run their analytics workloads directly in Snowflake's cloud data warehouse, rather than being forced to extract data into ThoughtSpot for analysis and return it to Snowflake for storage.
[ThoughtSpot for Snowpark] allows us to tie into machine learning models executed inside of Snowpark and create AI applications.
Seann GardinerSenior vice president of business development, ThoughtSpot
In addition, Snowflake integrated ThoughtSpot's platform into its Partner Connect program, enabling Snowflake customers to experiment with ThoughtSpot to see if it was the right analytics platform for their needs.
ThoughtSpot for Snowpark, therefore, was a result of the close partnership between ThoughtSpot and Snowflake. The two share hundreds of customers, according to Gardiner, and the vendors are in frequent contact, looking for opportunities to develop integrations.
Using ThoughtSpot forSnowpark, joint customers will be able to accelerate the movement of augmented intelligence and machine learning applications from production to action and create more efficient data pipelines that lead to decision-making, according to ThoughtSpot. In addition, they will be able to build and launch applications that combine the capabilities of Snowpark and ThoughtSpot Everywhere.
ThoughtSpot for Snowpark has the potential to be a significant addition for ThoughtSpot users, according to Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research. First, however, Snowpark needs to become generally available and add support for more coding languages.
"It will be a big deal once Snowpark is generally available and once it supports Python," Henschen said.
The next step for Snowpark will be public preview, but Henschen said he doesn't expect it be generally available until the fourth quarter of 2021, at the earliest. Currently, he added, Snowpark supports Java and Scala with support for Python part of the roadmap.
ThoughtSpot moves
The unveiling of ThoughtSpot for Snowpark comes after a flurry of several significant moves by ThoughtSpot.
In September 2020, the vendor revealed it is making the cloud its primary development focus after previously catering to an on-premises base and, subsequently, released ThoughtSpot Cloud. Since then, it has released both ThoughtSpot One and ThoughtSpot Everywhere, developed an alliance with Microsoft Azure, sold an equity stake to Snowflake, and made the first two acquisitions in its history.
"Last fall's ThoughtSpot Cloud launch was a crucial move to get in sync with market deployment preferences," Henschen said. "I like April's ThoughtSpot Everywhere low-code embedding announcement as well, because it will enable companies to weave the ThoughtSpot search experience into applications where businesspeople do their work."
With ThoughtSpot for Snowpark generally available, Gardiner said ThoughtSpot and Snowflake will continue to look for integrations. In addition, ThoughtSpot will look to add more integrations with other cloud data partners.
"We're going to have thoughtful integrations with all of these cloud platforms," he said. "When you use ThoughtSpot on Snowflake, we want it to feel native, and it's the same thing for other cloud platforms we support. Our focus is going to be continuing to put a big investment in the cloud."
