In 2006 people started saying data is the new oil. Little did they know things were just getting started. The average enterprise is managing 347 TB of data. Globally, the volume of data is doubling every two years. While everyone is foaming at the mouth over the AI revolution, a number of companies are focused on the building block of that revolution — data.
In September 2022, we published a deep dive comparing Snowflake and Databricks, and how these two companies have approached the data landscape from very different angles, but are increasingly in each others cross-hairs. Databricks, expanding from an initial focus on data science, and Snowflake from the data warehouse.
Just this week, Snowflake announced the acquisition of Ponder, a Python platform, which increases Snowflake users’ data science capabilities. Meanwhile, Databricks announced the acquisition of Arcion, a data tool that allows users “to provide native solutions to ingest data from various databases and SaaS applications into the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.”
The data platform goes deeper into data science; the data science platform gets a more robust data platform. Each of these companies are increasingly vying to become the center of the data universe for each of their customers. Upon the foundation of data infrastructure, that enables both companies to dive deeper into the AI revolution.
Databricks and Snowflake have acquired 6 and 10 companies respectively. While Snowflake’s largest acquisition was $800 million for Streamlit, the data-based app builder, Databricks $1.3 billion acquisition of MosaicML is the largest across both companies. That acquisition sets the stage for the next big wave in enterprise data: enabling in-production generative AI models built on a company’s proprietary data engine.
Each of these data titans are battling it out. The question now is who will come out on top?
