SNOW - As Snowflake Databricks competition heats up Oppenheimer sees 'multiple winners'

2023-06-30 08:57:04 ET

Snowflake ( NYSE: SNOW ) held its developer and investor conferences this week, as did competitor Databricks, with investment firm Oppenheimer stating there is likely to be "multiple winners" in the data warehousing and platforming space.

Analyst Ittai Kidron noted the conferences were highlighted by the advances made by both companies in different areas, including analytics, data science and generative AI. Snowflake ( SNOW ) focused a bit more on AI and machine learning workloads, while Databricks was more focused on becoming an end-to-end platform enabler of AI models and applications.

"The events/announcements illustrate the growing importance of integrated data/AI platforms, which we believe in the long run can capture an increasing portion of the value in the cloud data stack," Kidron wrote in an investor note.

"We also believe there will be multiple winners, given the outsized opportunity ahead, the rapidly innovating market, the need for cloud neutrality, and the shift away from legacy [on-premise] systems."

Kidron added that both Snowflake ( SNOW ) and Databricks - which is private - started with different approaches, with Snowflake focusing on data warehousing and Databricks focusing on a data lake, but over time, the two have converged to look more alike.

Snowflake ( SNOW ) is now building out broader data stores, in addition to focusing on AI and machine learning, while Databricks is now offering cloud-based data warehousing.

"We see both as winners, taking share from legacy systems and cloud service providers, and co-existing at most organizations," Kidron added.

Kidron said Snowflake's ( SNOW ) target of $10B in revenue for fiscal 2029 is now "more attainable" than it was a year ago and highlighted its operating margin and free cash flow margin expectations of 30%.

More on Snowflake

• Snowflake: Long-Term Moat Assessment
• Snowflake: Accelerating Our Reality Upload Despite Macro Headwinds
• Snowflake rises as it announces Nvidia partnership for generative AI apps

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