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Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI

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Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI
News

News

Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI

2024-11-12 22:10 Last Updated At:22:20

No-Headquarters/BOZEMAN, Mont.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 12, 2024--

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW), the AI Data Cloud company, today announced at its annual developer conference, BUILD 2024, new advancements to its market-leading platform that enable enterprises to cut through their data and AI chaos to accelerate value. Today, Snowflake serves as a leading platform for enterprise data lake, data warehouse, data lakehouse, and data mesh architectures — delivering a unified, fully managed service that eliminates complexity and maintenance for users.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241112377796/en/

Snowflake’s platform empowers organizations to harness all of their data, whether it’s structured, unstructured, or semi-structured, with increased interoperability across various platforms. This gives customers more choice and flexibility to select the data architecture that’s best for them, while benefiting from the built-in compliance, security, privacy, discovery, and collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake Horizon Catalog.

“We give enterprises the power of choice when it comes to their data estates, and our industry-leading platform and governance capabilities serve as the data foundation for organizations to build powerful AI apps and models at scale, all with complete control and flexibility over their data,” said James Malone, Head of Data Storage and Engineering, Snowflake. “Our continued advancements around Apache Iceberg and the new Snowflake Open Catalog, alongside their easy integrations with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, bring increased simplicity to organizations’ complex data architectures so they can accelerate value, while reducing the number of steps required to use and govern their open lakehouse architectures.”

Snowflake Enables Customers to Unlock Value from All of Their Data, Regardless of Where it Lives

Snowflake’s flexibility extends beyond architecture options, enabling users to harness their data with full interoperability, regardless of where it resides. For enterprises that prefer to store their data in Apache Iceberg™, the industry’s open table format of choice, Snowflake is helping users more effectively integrate and secure their open lakehouse implementations with Snowflake Open Catalog (now generally available). As a managed service for Apache Polaris™ (Incubating), Snowflake Open Catalog allows users to easily adapt as the needs of their organization evolve by integrating new engines and applying consistent governance controls across them. Snowflake Open Catalog will continue to evolve in functionality as the Apache Polaris project does, while users also benefit from the reliability, security, scalability, and support provided by a Snowflake-managed service.

“Snowflake Open Catalog gives our global teams the flexibility to integrate all of our tools in one place, with comprehensive read and write support from various engines, while maintaining the unified governance we depend on to effectively manage our open data lakehouse,” said Vineet Gorhe, Chief Technology Officer, DemandHelm. “Snowflake’s commitment to true open source without vendor lock-in gives us the confidence to innovate faster, without having to worry about the complexities of setup, maintenance, and updates for our lakehouse strategy.”

To help users further reduce costs, improve performance, and turn data lakes into more open lakehouses with Apache Iceberg, Snowflake is also unveiling a slew of new features for streaming, ingestion, change data capture pipelines, and integrations.

Outside of Apache Iceberg, Snowflake is making it easier for enterprises to derive insights from other data types within the AI Data Cloud, including unstructured data with Document AI (now generally available on AWS and Microsoft Azure). Document AI leverages Snowflake’s state-of-the-art large language model, Arctic-TILT, and extracts information from both text-heavy paragraphs and other content within documents — such as logos, handwritten text like signatures, or checkmarks. Hundreds of business leaders from organizations including Florida State University, Intelycare, Osmose Utility Services, and more are using Document AI today to effortlessly distill insights and analytical values from PDFs and other documents using natural language.

For organizations that prefer a vendor-managed architecture to host all of their data within the AI Data Cloud, Snowflake is constantly improving the economics of its leading platform so that organizations don’t have to manage their own data and catalogs. To further enhance this, Snowflake is introducing the new Storage Lifecycle Policies (now in private preview) to help organizations better maintain storage costs and compliance with new ways to archive or delete data. In parallel, Snowflake is continuing to make legacy relational database management system migrations to Snowflake even easier by adding additional Views support to SnowConvert, Snowflake’s native code conversion tooling.

Snowflake Adds New Threat Prevention and Security Monitoring Capabilities to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog

The security of customers’ Snowflake accounts has been a business priority from day one, and Snowflake continues to innovate in order to make the platform more secure by default. As a result, Snowflake is enhancing the Horizon Catalog to include credential theft prevention and detection by automatically disabling users’ passwords discovered on the dark web through Leaked Password Protection (generally available soon). In addition, the Horizon Catalog is adding support for Programmatic Access Tokens (PATs) (in private preview soon) for API authentication, which simplifies the developer experience for application access while enhancing security by including scope and expiration for such tokens.

Snowflake is also strengthening its industry-leading security posture management through enhancements to the Snowflake Trust Center, a tool that helps organizations monitor and improve the security of their Snowflake accounts. Snowflake is announcing the new Threat Intelligence Scanner Package (now generally available) that provides a Risky User View to automatically detect which users — human or service — are risky with clear mitigations on how to reduce said risks. To help unlock innovations from cybersecurity partners and address customers’ diverse security needs, Snowflake is also extending the Trust Center through custom scanner packages (in private preview soon) available as Snowflake Native Apps on the Snowflake Marketplace, starting with five marquee partners including ALTR, Hunters, OneTrust, Rubrik, and Trustlogix.

Additional announcements to the Snowflake Horizon Catalog include the public previews of Lineage Visualization Interface for Data and ML Assets and Synthetic Data Generation, alongside the recent general availability of Differential Privacy Policy.

“As a leading customer experience transformation consultancy, Merkle relies on the Snowflake Horizon Catalog’s robust governance and advanced security monitoring capabilities to safeguard our customers’ most sensitive data, preventing unauthorized access and data exfiltration between internal teams, allowing the right people to have access to the right information at the right time,” explains Morten Lileng, Global Head of Merkury Engineering, Merkle, a dentsu company. “With Snowflake, we have full visibility into our data usage, all of which is critical for protecting our customers and ultimately maintaining their trust.”

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Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains express and implied forward-looking statements, including statements regarding (i) Snowflake’s business strategy, (ii) Snowflake’s products, services, and technology offerings, including those that are under development or not generally available, (iii) market growth, trends, and competitive considerations, and (iv) the integration, interoperability, and availability of Snowflake’s products with and on third-party platforms. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those described under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and the Annual Reports on Form 10-K that Snowflake files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In light of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, you should not rely on any forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

© 2024 Snowflake Inc. All rights reserved. Snowflake, the Snowflake logo, and all other Snowflake product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Snowflake Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names or logos mentioned or used herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). Snowflake may not be associated with, or be sponsored or endorsed by, any such holder(s).

About Snowflake

Snowflake makes enterprise AI easy, efficient and trusted. Thousands of companies around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to share data, build applications, and power their business with AI. The era of enterprise AI is here. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).

Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI (Graphic: Business Wire)

Snowflake Advances Industry-Leading Platform to Help Enterprises Bring Simplicity to Data and AI (Graphic: Business Wire)

BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand and Cambodia signed a ceasefire agreement on Saturday to end weeks of fighting along their border over competing territorial claims.

The agreement took effect at noon (0500 GMT) and calls for a halt in military movements and airspace violation for military purposes.

Only Thailand has carried out airstrikes, hitting sites in Cambodia as recently as Saturday morning, according to the Cambodian Defense Ministry.

The deal also calls for Thailand, after the ceasefire has held for 72 hours, to repatriate 18 Cambodian soldiers it has held as prisoners since earlier fighting in July. Their release has been a major demand of the Cambodian side.

Within hours of the signing, Thailand's Foreign Ministry protested to Cambodia that a Thai soldier sustained a permanent disability when he stepped on an anti-personnel land mine it charged had been laid by Cambodian forces.

The agreement was signed by the countries’ defense ministers, Cambodia’s Tea Seiha and Thailand’s Nattaphon Narkphanit, at a border checkpoint. It followed three-day lower-level talks by military officials.

It declares that the sides are committed to an earlier ceasefire that ended five days of fighting in July and follow-up agreements.

The original July ceasefire was brokered by Malaysia and pushed through by pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened to withhold trade privileges unless Thailand and Cambodia agreed. It was formalized in more detail in October at a regional meeting in Malaysia that Trump attended.

Despite those deals, the countries carried on a bitter propaganda war and minor cross-border violence continued, escalating in early December to widespread heavy fighting.

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed the ceasefire announcement and urged Cambodia and Thailand to fully honor it and the terms of the peace accord reached earlier in Malaysia.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the ceasefire “a positive step towards alleviating the suffering of civilians, ending current hostilities, and creating an environment conducive to achieving lasting peace,” his spokesman said..

The U.N. chief expressed appreciation to Malaysia, China and the United States for their efforts to peacefully resolve the conflict, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. “The United Nations stands ready to support efforts aimed at sustaining peace and stability in the region.”

Thailand has lost 26 soldiers and one civilian as a direct result of the combat since Dec. 7, according to officials. Thailand has also reported 44 civilian deaths.

Cambodia hasn’t issued an official figure on military casualties, but says that 30 civilians have been killed and 90 injured. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated on both sides of the border.

“Today’s ceasefire also paves the way for the displaced people who are living in the border areas to be able to return to their homes, work in the fields, and even allow their children to be able to return to schools and resume their studies,” Cambodia's Defense Minister Tea Seiha told reporters after the signing.

Each side blamed the other for initiating the fighting and claimed to be acting in self-defense.

The agreement also calls on both sides to adhere to international agreements against deploying land mines, a major concern of Thailand.

Thai soldiers along the border have been wounded in at least 10 incidents this year by what Thailand says were newly planted Cambodian mines. Cambodia says the mines were left over from decades of civil war that ended in the late 1990s.

Following the latest injury on Saturday, Thailand's Foreign Ministry noted that the new agreement “includes key provisions on joint humanitarian demining operations to ensure the safety of military personnel and civilians in the border areas as soon as possible.”

Another clause says the two sides “agree to refrain from disseminating false information or fake news.”

The agreement calls for a resumption of previous measures to demarcate the border. The sides also agreed to cooperate in suppressing transnational crimes. That's primarily a reference to online scams perpetrated by organized crime that have bilked victims around the world of billions of dollars each year. Cambodia is a center for such criminal enterprises.

Malaysia's Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who was instrumental in putting together the original ceasefire, said the new agreement “reflects a shared recognition that restraint is required, above all in the interest of civilians.”

Many clauses similar to those in Saturday's agreement were included in October's ceasefire document, and were open to various interpretations and generally honored only in part. These included provisions concerning land mines and the Cambodian prisoners.

The fragility of the new agreement was underlined by Thailand’s Defense Ministry spokesperson Surasant Kongsiri in a news briefing after Saturday's signing. He said that the safe return of civilians to their homes would indicate the situation had stabilized enough to allow the repatriation of the captured Cambodian soldiers.

“However if the ceasefire does not materialize, this would indicate a lack of sincerity on the Cambodian side to create sure peace,” he said. "Therefore, the 72- hour ceasefire beginning today is not an act of trust nor unconditional acceptance but a time frame to tangibly prove whether Cambodia can truly cease the use of weapons, provocations and threats in the area.”

——-

Sopheng Cheang reported from Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

CORRECTS NAME OF THAI DEFENSE MINISTER - In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Nattaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

CORRECTS NAME OF THAI DEFENSE MINISTER - In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Nattaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

CORRECTS NAME OF THAI DEFENSE MINISTER - In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Nattaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

CORRECTS NAME OF THAI DEFENSE MINISTER - In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Nattaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Natthaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Natthaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP)

Illumination flares fired by Thai military forces shine in Poipet, Cambodia, as seen from Sa Kaeo, Thailand, on Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, following clashes between Thai and Cambodian soldiers. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

Illumination flares fired by Thai military forces shine in Poipet, Cambodia, as seen from Sa Kaeo, Thailand, on Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, following clashes between Thai and Cambodian soldiers. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

The Thai military fires artillery towards Cambodia, Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, seen from Thailand's Sa Kaeo province. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

The Thai military fires artillery towards Cambodia, Friday, Dec. 26, 2025, seen from Thailand's Sa Kaeo province. (AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn)

In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Natthaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP) g

In this photo released by Agence Kampuchea Press (AKP), Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Seiha, left, stands with Thai Defense Minister Natthaphon Narkphanit, right, at the General Border Committee Meeting in Chanthaburi Province, Thailand Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025. (AKP via AP) g

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