Capital One recently announced that they are launching an enterprise B2B software business focused on providing cloud and data management solutions for other companies. The idea is that they want to share their expertise and best practices developed in managing large data sets serving over 100M customers.
The first product for that new business unit is called Capital One Slingshot, which provides data management solutions for customers of Snowflake. Overall, it is designed to help other businesses accelerate their adoption of the Snowflake Data Cloud by delivering automation, tools and analytics around usage. Capital One is a large customer of Snowflake and has five years of experience working with the Data Cloud. Now, they want to sell consulting and software services to share that insight.
Slingshot will focus on helping businesses in four ways:
- Manage costs. Slingshot will provide intelligent cost savings recommendations and dashboards to monitor warehouse performance.
- Visibility and alerts. Tooling will generate insights and visibility into important changes to Snowflake costs and usage through proactive alerts.
- Federate warehouse administration. This will allow each line of business to manage their warehouse utilization and spend independently. This helps hold individual teams accountable for their usage by breaking it out.
- Automate governance. Through custom workflows, dynamic warehouse provisioning and self-service capabilities, allow teams to maintain oversight of their data management.
I think this new practice from Capital One could help drive Snowflake adoption, particularly for other companies in the financial services arena. In this case, Capital One is launching a consultancy practice. More broadly, this underscores the opportunity for Snowflake as a generalized data platform upon which other companies build their services.
Capital One was an early adopter of Snowflake, which enabled our more than 6,000 analysts to run millions of queries with no degradation in performance. Snowflake gave us the ability to scale instantly for nearly any workload, and as our access to data increased, we wanted to ensure we were managing costs in a well-governed way. Since creating and launching Slingshot at Capital One, we’ve seen 27 percent cost savings over projected costs by dynamically rightsizing resources. Slingshot has allowed us to further scale our use of Snowflake, and we’re excited to help other companies harness the full power of the cloud to accelerate innovation for customers.
Senior Vice President, Enterprise Data Platforms at Capital One
One side effect of Capital One Slingshot, though, is that they offer to help companies optimize Snowflake spend. That’s healthy for adoption in the long run, but may smooth out spikes in utilization growth. As an investor, my first reaction is that it could slow down revenue growth. Stepping back though, I think it’s important that customers feel like the ROI on their Snowflake spend is worthwhile. That will ultimately drive down costs and empower customers to move even more workloads onto Snowflake.
Finally, I think these kinds of relationships with the largest companies in industry ecosystems (Capital One is huge) provide evidence of Snowflake’s savvy in the go-to-market arena. Forming partnerships like these demonstrate Snowflake’s depth in distribution and the value of their platform for other businesses.
NOTE: This article does not represent investment advice and is solely the author’s opinion for managing his own investment portfolio. Readers are expected to perform their own due diligence before making investment decisions. Please see the Disclaimer for more detail.
