Research Note: Snowflake BUILD 2025 Announcements
At its recent BUILD 2025 event, Snowflake unveiled a substantial array of platform updates centered on three core themes: compute performance optimization, data interoperability across heterogeneous environments, and operational automation.
The offerings address persistent enterprise challenges around data fragmentation, manual infrastructure management, and the operational overhead of supporting both transactional and analytical workloads on unified platforms.
Research Brief: Oracle Database 26ai Delivers Fully Integrated AI
Oracle released its Oracle Database 26ai at its recent AI World event in Las Vegas. The update makes the database an integrated platform that embeds artificial intelligence capabilities across data management, development, and analytics operations.
The platform integrates vector search capabilities with traditional database functions, supports agentic AI workflows through in-database tools and MCP servers, and extends analytics capabilities through Iceberg table format support. Oracle also bundles in advanced AI features, including AI Vector Search, at no additional cost.
Oracle AI World 2025: Bringing Cohesion to the AI Data Stack
Oracle AI World 2025 in Las Vegas was a clear demonstration of how far the company has come from its roots as a database vendor. This year’s event, as its new name might give away, was all about AI.
Oracle’s announcements centered on its Oracle AI Data Platform, a new Oracle database release, the new Autonomous AI Lakehouse, along with new advances in Oracle’s distributed cloud portfolio, and deepened multi-cloud partnerships with both Google Cloud and AWS. That’s a lot – and we’re just hitting the highlights.
Research Brief: Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse
Oracle recently announced its Oracle Autonomous AI at its Oracle AI World event in Las Vegas. The new offering combines Oracle’s Autonomous AI Database platform with native Apache Iceberg support. The offering addresses persistent enterprise challenges around data lock-in and platform interoperability by providing standardized access to data across multiple clouds and catalogs.
Research Note: Cisco’s AI-Powered Transformation of the Splunk Portfolio at .conf 2025
At its recent Splunk .conf25 in Boston, Cisco unveiled a comprehensive suite of AI-powered enhancements across its recently acquired Splunk portfolio, showing significant progress in integrating the two companies’ technologies.
The announcements centered on three core themes: agentic AI automation, unified data architectures, and enhanced observability capabilities.
Research Note: Snowflake Evolves into AI Platform at Summit 2025
Snowflake recently held its annual Snowflake Summit in San Francisco where the announcements show the company evolving from a data warehouse provider to an AI platform orchestrator. The announcements address three core enterprise challenges: democratizing data access beyond technical teams, accelerating AI development workflows, and reducing data integration overhead.
Research Note: Snowflake’s Crunchy Data Acquisition
At its annual Snowflake Summit in San Francisco, Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data for approximately $250 million. The deal brings enterprise-grade PostgreSQL capabilities into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud through a new offering called Snowflake Postgres. This acquisition addresses a critical gap in Snowflake’s platform, while intensifying competition with Databricks for dominance in AI infrastructure.
Quick Take: Databricks Acquires Fennel
Databricks announced the acquisition of Fennel, a specialized platform focused on feature engineering for machine learning applications. This acquisition bolsters Databricks’ capabilities in feature engineering, especially for real-time and streaming data applications.
Quick Take: IBM Acquires Hakkoda, Expands Consulting Reach
IBM has announced its acquisition of Hakkoda, a New York-based data and AI consultancy, as part of its strategy to expand its consulting services, particularly in the financial services, public sector, and healthcare and life sciences industries.
Research Note: Snowflake Deep Integration with Anthropic’s Claude
Snowflake announced that it’s integrated Anthropic’s Claude models across its Cortex AI platform, enabling enterprises to query and analyze data using natural language instead of SQL. The partnership targets the fundamental challenge of data democratization, allowing business users to access insights without requiring technical expertise.
The integration spans three core products: Cortex Analyst converts natural language to SQL, Cortex Search retrieves unstructured data, and Cortex Agents orchestrates complex multi-step operations.
Research Note: Databricks Acquires BladeBridge
Databricks announced the acquisition of BladeBridge, a provider of AI-powered migration solutions, to facilitate the transition of enterprise data warehouses to Databricks SQL (DBSQL).
BladeBridge automates the migration of workloads from over 20 different data warehouses and ETL platforms, using large language models for code analysis, conversion, and validation.
Quick Take: Snowflake Acquires Datavolo
Snowflake recently announced its acquisition of Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, to enhance its capabilities in automating data flows across enterprise environments.