Knowledge cloud firm Snowflake announced today that former Neeva co-founder Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has served as Snowflake’s SVP of AI for the reason that firm acquired Neeva, an AI-powered search engine, has been named CEO.
Ramaswamy replaces Frank Slootman, who has determined to retire after 5 years as CEO. Slootman will proceed to function chairman of the board. The information of Slootman stepping down led Snowflake’s inventory to drop over 20% at present.
On Snowflake’s This fall earnings name — which beat analysts’ expectations, with income up 31.5% yr on yr to $774.7 million — Slootman addressed his retirement and Ramaswamy’s appointment. He stated that since becoming a member of Snowflake, Ramaswamy has been main Snowflake’s AI methods, bringing new merchandise and options to market “at an unbelievable tempo,” together with Cortex, a managed service to construct LLM apps within the information cloud.
Slootman says Snowflake wants a ‘hard-driving technologist’
With the “onslaught” of generative AI, Slootman added that “Snowflake wants a hard-driving technologist to navigate the challenges the brand new world represents — Sridhar’s imaginative and prescient for the longer term and his confirmed capability to execute at scale made it clear to us as a board he’s the correct govt for the correct time to steer Snowflake.”
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Ramaswamy additionally spoke on the earnings name, saying “Snowflake is a as soon as in a technology firm that can revolutionize the world with its cloud information platform,” and that “generative AI is on the forefront of my buyer conversations.”
VentureBeat spoke to Ramaswamy, who earlier than Neeva led led all of Google’s promoting merchandise, in a wide-ranging September 2023 interview three months after Snowflake’s acquisition of Neeva. At the moment, he stated that he was working to grasp the corporate’s product roadmap and what the Neeva group will construct to assist Snowflake shoppers with broad-based search entry to structured and unstructured information.
Ramaswamy has stated enterprises need Snowflake’s assist in AI
“One good factor we did is begin constructing prototypes on prime of Snowflake even earlier than the acquisition,” he stated within the VentureBeat interview. “My cofounder and I pressured the group to begin fascinated about what would we construct? So we obtained somewhat little bit of a working begin.” Now, he added, he feels able to sort out deep buyer conversations that helps shoppers transfer on their Snowflake journey.
“Snowflake has spent the higher a part of 10-plus years build up wonderful relationships with prospects, they belief us with their information, and in flip, we take their information very, very critically and ensure it’s secure and safe for them,” he stated. Quite a lot of enterprises, he added, flip to Snowflake to ask how they need to use the facility of AI within the experiences they create, each internally and for patrons: “So this appears like a extremely good place to be.”
