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.