Snowflake rolls back growth estimates, wipes 30% off value Cloud-native data warehouse outfit Snowflake – once valued at a heart-thumping $120bn following its 2020 IPO – saw 30 per cent wiped off its value in after-hours trading yesterday as it lowered guidance on revenue forecasts. Execs said part of the reason for reducing growth estimates was that new product features meant …
This is where the insanity of many of the valuations for these Cloud service or providers comes in.
Was it ever worth $120Bn? Probably not.
Is it making a profit? nowhere near, losses are humungous, $700 I think so far.
Has it any assets? Allegedly $5.9Bn
That takes us full circle, just like Uber and all the others, they are simply not worth what "The Markets" claim but there is a vested interest to pump up the value at the because of all VC money. They need their return.
It's not just that, though I'm sure there's plenty of incentive to manipulate prices higher. The bigger problem is that the world's central banks have been not only handing out free money but cramming it down everyone's throats for 20+ years now. That money has to go somewhere, and most of it has gone into speculation. That's because investment takes decades to pay off in the form of steady profits while speculation can make you rich(er) in a week. If it doesn't work out, just default and move on, but it pretty much always works out because the free money keeps gushing so prices and multiples keep going higher. It's called the allocative effect and it's the result of one of the worst errors in human history.
So on the one hand, the people who paid $120b to own Snowflake were setting fire to their money. On the other, most of that money was never tied to any kind of value creation to begin with. The losers are the suckers who gave up something of value to get money, like their irreplaceable time or valuable natural resources, then spent it on worthless or overpriced assets. The winners? Rich people with access to the free money spigots. What a wonderful world the central bankers have created for us!
Never mind the growth slump - look at those losses! Hard to see how a business that hands over such a significant chunk of everything it takes in revenue to the underlying cloud providers. Those are simply unsustainable figures unless the explosive growth fairy comes a-visiting again.
Which it won't, because the cat is out of the bag about what Snowflake really is. The hype bubble is over.
Analysis Under Nevada's baking summer sunshine, Snowflake last week promised it would bring together two ways of working with data that mix about as well as oil and water.
The data warehouse vendor – well known for its stratospheric $120 billion post-IPO valuation – said it would support both analytics and transactional workloads in the same system.
Launched at the Snowflake Summit 2022 in Vegas, Unistore would be the "foundation for another wave of innovation in the Snowflake Data Cloud," said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product. "Similar to how we redefined data lakes and data warehouses for our customers, Unistore is ushering in a renaissance of building and deploying a new generation of applications in the Data Cloud," he said.
YugabyteDB, the self-styled double-decker distributed relational database, has introduced a read-committed isolation level, allowing for more flexibility for devs and bringing it into step with its more established RDBMS rivals.
With the general availability of YugabyteDB 2.15, the company behind the PostgreSQL-compatible database, said to be inspired by Google Spanner, claims to be adding performance enhancements and dynamic workload optimization.
Speaking to The Register, CTO Karthik Ranganathan, a former Facebook technical lead, said Yugabyte was the first and only distributed SQL vendor to offer all three PostgreSQL isolation levels, making it that much easier to shift existing applications to a distributed database with advanced support for the default PostgreSQL isolation level.
Beijing's efforts to grow local alternatives to the wares of the world's mightiest tech companies have made progress in the relational database market, according to research by analyst firm International Data Corp (IDC).
Under what IDC referred to as "favorable policies," the relational database market share of local Chinese manufacturers is rapidly catching up with the likes of Oracle and IBM. Local players including Dameng Database, Renmin University Golden Warehouse, and Huawei are scooping up customers.
In the public cloud, operators' own databases dominate. Alibaba Cloud took the lion's share of the market in the second half of 2021, followed by Tencent, AWS and Huawei. For on-prem deployment, Huawei is the winner with nearly a quarter of the market, followed by Oracle.
The UK has signed up to a US plan for sharing police-held biometric data about citizens with US border officials.
According to a member of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), the body met "informally" with representatives of the US Department of Homeland Security this week to discuss the plans.
They come under the auspices of the Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP), which is designed to increase the US Department Of Homeland Security's ability to detect threats through biometric information sharing. Israel signed up to the arrangement in March.
DataStax, the database company built around open-source wide-column Apache Cassandra, has launched a streaming platform as a service with backwards compatibility for messaging standards JMS, MQ, and Kafka.
The fully managed messaging and event streaming service, based on open-source Apache Pulsar, is a streaming technology built for the requirements of high-scale, real-time applications.
But DataStax wanted to help customers get data from their existing messaging platforms, as well as those who migrate to Pulsar, said Chris Latimer, vice president of product management.
Analysis At MongoDB's recent conference in New York, the company demonstrated its ambition in taking on workloads from other databases.
The company has made significant inroads into the database market with a developer-friendly distributed document database to help devs build modern, web-based, transactional systems.
Time series and search have become targets, with the promise of support for secondary indexes in the former, and Search Facets to help developers build search experiences more rapidly in the latter.
DataStax, the database company based on the open-source Cassandra system, has secured $115 million in funding for a $1.6 billion valuation.
Led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs and backed by RCM Private Markets and EDB Investments, the latest round follows a strong first quarter based on the popularity of DataStax's Cassandra DBaaS Astra DB. Existing investors include Crosslink Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, OnePrime Capital, and others.
Cassandra is a distributed, wide-column store database suited to real-time use cases such as e-commerce and inventory management, personalization and recommendations, Internet of Things-related applications, and fraud detection. It is freely available on the Apache Version 2 license, although DataStax offers managed service Astra on a subscription model.
PostgreSQL co-creator and MIT computer science professor Michael Stonebraker has listed his top requests for features to add into the popular open-source database, including a time travel function he admits was implemented badly in the 1980s.
Speaking at Postgres Vision conference, Stonebreaker said the time-travel code was fundamentally a good idea, as it allows users to query data from the database’s history, and had introduced an implementation in the 1990s.
“The problem with time travel back in 1995 was that my implementation was absolutely awful. It was slow, slow, slow, slow. Whether or not time travel was a good idea, the implementation was too slow to be interesting, so it was rightfully deleted by the powers that be in the committee that has been dealing with Postgres since 1995,” he told attendees.
Cloud data warehouse specialist Snowflake is broadening its toolset to allow devs to build applications inside its platform, while providing a new row-based storage engine to support analytics on transactional data.
Launched at its annual conference this week, the features are part of a plan to encourage users – and investors – to no longer see it as a mere cloud data warehouse and to view it more as a platform for sharing data and data-analytics applications.
Snowflake is supporting new transactional workloads in something it calls Unistore, which is based on Hybrid Tables supported by a new row-based storage engine to better handle transactional data.
Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.
In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.
"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.
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