The $800 Million (USD) acquisition of Streamlit by Snowflake!
If you’re in the data science industry or a data professional, you’re probably familiar with the rapidly growing data warehousing company Snowflake, but you may not have heard of Streamlit, the popular open-source app framework for Machine Learning and Data Science teams.
On March 2nd, Streamlit released an official statement saying that they’ve been acquired for $800 Million USD by Snowflake and are now planning to scale Streamlit by integrating with the Snowflake data warehouse.
This is a snippet from Streamlit’s website:
“Streamlit has been acquired by Snowflake to join forces and open new frontiers in data science and data application development.
What convinced us to join? It was our interactions with Snowflake’s founders and engineers. It was love at first code review. As we drew boxes and imagined the future, we found ourselves excitedly finishing each other’s sentences. We were sketching the same vision.
Working within Snowflake, we realized, would be a win-win-win: for the data community, for Streamlit technology, and for Snowflake’s customers.”
What are the implications of this acquisition?
The main question we’re hearing right across our industry is: what does this acquisition mean for the future? Here are our thoughts.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a rapidly growing cloud data warehousing platform helping Analysts and Scientists build data solutions natively in SQL and Non-natively in Python, GO, .NET, Java, C and more. It’s rapidly becoming an industry standard to store and manage data efficiently, which is why our team at White Box recommend it to our peers, colleagues and our clients. It’s also a central place where we build the majority of our solutions as is proven to be quite powerful, intuitive and cost-effective.
For more information, read our review of Snowflake here.
On the other hand, Streamlit is a free and open-source application framework to build web-based data applications using Python. They also provide a deployment solution to manage, share and collaborate on Streamlit applications. At White Box, we see the power of this tool as it makes building data applications using python far more user-friendly and easily deployable.
What could happen next for these brands?
Long story short is that we speculate that Snowflake may provide an opportunity to perform data operations without coding – and the implications for this are significant.
As you can imagine, this acquisition caught the attention of our entire industry, as Snowflake already has its own built-in solution to build dashboards, which is called Snowsight. This basically is also one of the solutions Streamlit provides, however Snowsight only works in SQL and in our opinion, was a little too basic.
We’re left wondering whether Snowflake is planning to integrate Streamlit into Snowsight to help it support multiple languages outside of SQL.
However, Benoit Dageville, the Co-founder & President of Products at Snowflake, mentioned that they likely are going to pivot Streamlit to cater to non-technical users to assist in building data applications. Up until this point, Snowflake has offered data professional a technical approach to store and manage data but has, however missed a larger piece of the pie i.e. support for people with no data skills. Streamlit might bridge that gap.
Essentially, this implies that existing Snowflake customers would soon be able to leverage Streamlit’s app development framework to build data application which are powered by Snowflake Data Warehouse with far less effort.
Time will soon tell and we’ll keep everyone up to date on our thoughts.
If you would like more information about both of these platforms or you would like a free live demo to see how they can support your business, contact us today.
We can help you make smarter, data-driven decisions.
White Box is highly experienced in providing data strategy, data science and data visualisation solutions.
As your data consultant partner, we’ll help you realise the full potential of your data and maximise your business success through advanced and innovative solutions that make all the difference.
Get in touch today for your free data strategy consultation.
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