Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Tyler Radke: Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask you about container services. So it sounds like you’re seeing some good early momentum there, more than 70 customers in private preview. I’m curious how many of those are actually deploying large language models directly on the Snowflake data? And for those customers that are doing that, what type of uplift or how you kind of characterize that consumption when they do that?

Christian Kleinerman: Yes. This is Christian. Yes, we have seen a variety of use cases, but a good number of those prior preview customers are leveraging GPU instances in silver and payer services for use of large language models. So for sure, it’s a meaningful part of the early adoption use cases and we’ve got lots of encouragement and excitement to continue the rollout of the preview.

Tyler Radke: Great. And just a question on go-to-market. So I think earlier this year, you talked about some execution issues and it seems like that’s been partially resolved to get good results in APAC. I guess, do you feel like you have all the right key sales leaders in place at this point? Or are there still some roles you’re looking for? And I guess, ultimately, do you feel like you’ve turned the corner on those execution issues as well?

Frank Slootman: Yes. It’s Frank. Look, in a global sales organization that we’re running and we’re running all the way from an on-demand selling motion that’s unattended, if you will, by salespeople to SMB, to an ISB to mid-range large and then the extremely large customers. The — it’s always a work in process. There’s always opportunity for improvement. That’s been true for as long as I’ve been here. That said, I feel we’re getting incrementally better, stronger, deeper in terms of our ability to sell. We’re becoming much more consistent and more and more productive every day. So a lot of stability and a lot of progress. But this is something that’s never over. Anybody who’s been in this business knows how this works. It’s a very dynamic mix of things.

But on the whole, we have to, as a company, a $3 billion or something of that order of magnitude run rate, we lean hard on our organization to show up and deliver those results every quarter. So it’s becoming a formidable enterprise in terms of our go-to-market capability.

Tyler Radke: Great, thank you.

Operator: Thank you Mr. Radke. Our next question is from the line of Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. You may proceed.

Brent Bracelin: Thank you and good afternoon. Frank, we’ll start with you here. I think last quarter, unstructured data was mentioned twice. You’ve called it out here more than a dozen times. You talked about October trends being up, I think, 17x increase year-over-year. How much of a game changer is this, particularly as we think about Document AI and Snowpark Containers coming out next year? Clearly, a focus here. It certainly hasn’t been an area you supported in the past, but it feels like there’s a sea change movement here. How much of a game changer is unstructured data support relative to the growth opportunity going forward?

Frank Slootman: Look, unstructured data, as I said earlier, is the majority of the world’s data. And until relatively recently, it’s been borderline unusable for analytical purposes, because it is unstructured and you can’t reference it in analytical workloads. It’s ironic that both through the on slide of large language models that is also extraordinarily of dealing with textual data as well as things just Document AI that Snowflake developed, and it’s bringing to the market that this data is going to become a full participant in these types of workloads. It’s super exciting. It’s going to really enriched and really unlock insights and outcomes and all of that we haven’t had before. So this is going to be a driver of our world as we know it in terms of this type of computing.

Brent Bracelin: That’s helpful. And Mike, if I look at average consumption revenue per customer, those metrics improved on a growth perspective, slightly year-over-year for the first time in over a year. What are the driving factors there? How much of this is just the optimization headwinds now starting to ease versus net new workloads coming on the platform?

Mike Scarpelli: Well, what I would say, and I’ll repeat what I’ve said at numerous times to investors, optimizations are part of our life. They’ve been happening at Snowflake from day 1, they will continue to happen. Nothing is new with optimization. I don’t see any big ones happening now, but that’s not to say they won’t happen in the future, because history has shown they happen all the time. Most of the growth that we’re seeing within our customers is we talked about two of our biggest growth customers was on-prem legacy migrations into Snowflake. So there’s initial migrations, but we’re also seeing new workload expansion within existing customers as well, too. So it’s — there’s no one thing that’s driving it. It’s just general consumption we’re seeing. And I will say Snowpark is starting to kick in for us. Still not 10% of our revenue. That’s a long ways to get there, but it’s still meaningful for us.

Brent Bracelin: Great to hear, thank you.

Operator: Thank you, Mr. Bracelin. Our next question is from the line of Derrick Wood with TD Cowen. You may proceed.

Derrick Wood: Great. Thanks. I guess I wanted to dovetail off of that on-premise legacy migrations. And I guess for Frank, I mean, when we saw the macro hit, I think it did cause a slowdown in customers looking to re-platform from on-prem to cloud. Just curious, I mean, I know you guys are kind of highlighting the consumption trends improving here. But wondering what you’re seeing in the pipeline for new Global 2000 accounts? And if you’re seeing legacy replatforming initiatives start to kick back up now that the macro environment has gotten a little bit more stable?

Frank Slootman: Well, I mean, there’s no doubt that the legacy replatforming is sort of the hardcore of our business. And almost surprisingly there is just an enormous amount of workloads still sitting on-premise that is still waiting to get migrated to the cloud. So I expect this to continue for a very long period of time. But as what Mike’s said is very important. Once you get those data states into the cloud, our new architectures and our new technologies are now enabling opportunities that people haven’t had before. And so that drives workload expansion. So it’s not just like, okay, we’re going to be doing in the cloud where we used to be doing on-premise, and that’s the foundation of the business. It is definitely foundational but the opportunity is really what grows from that.