Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
We believe in a data connected world where organizations have seamless access to explore, share, and unlock the value of data. To realize this vision, we deliver the Data Cloud, a network where Snowflake customers, partners, data providers, and data consumers can break down data silos and derive value from rapidly growing data sets in secure, governed, and compliant ways.
Our platform is the innovative technology that powers the Data Cloud, enabling customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, build data-driven applications, and share data. We provide our platform through a customer-centric, consumption-based business model, only charging customers for the resources they use.
Snowflake solves the decades-old problem of data silos and data governance. Leveraging the elasticity and performance of the public cloud, our platform enables customers to unify and query data to support a wide variety of use cases. It also provides frictionless and governed data access so users can securely share data inside and outside of their organizations, generally without copying or moving the underlying data. As a result, customers can blend existing data with new data for broader context, augment data science efforts, and create new monetization streams. Delivered as a service, our platform requires near-zero maintenance, enabling customers to focus on deriving value from their data rather than managing infrastructure.
Our cloud-native architecture consists of three independently scalable but logically integrated layers across storage, compute, and cloud services. The storage layer ingests massive amounts and varieties of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to create a unified data record. The compute layer provides dedicated resources to enable users to simultaneously access common data sets for many use cases with minimal latency. The cloud services layer intelligently optimizes each use case’s performance requirements with no administration. This architecture is built on three major public clouds across 31 regional deployments around the world. These deployments are generally interconnected to deliver the Data Cloud, enabling a consistent, global user experience.
Our platform supports a wide range of workloads that enable our customers’ most important business objectives, including data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. From January 1, 2022 to January 31, 2022, we processed an average of over 1,496 million daily queries across all of our customer accounts, up from an average of over 777 million daily queries during the corresponding month of the prior fiscal year. We also recently launched our Powered by Snowflake program to help companies build, operate, and grow applications in the Data Cloud by supporting developers across all stages of the application journey. Members of the program have access to go-to-market, customer support, and engineering expertise.
We have an industry-vertical focus, which allows us to go to market with tailored business solutions. For example, we have launched the Financial Services Data Cloud, the Media Data Cloud, the Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud, and the Retail Data Cloud. Each of these Data Clouds brings together Snowflake’s platform capabilities with industry-specific partner solutions and datasets to drive business growth and deliver improved experiences and insights.
Our business benefits from powerful network effects. The Data Cloud will continue to grow as organizations move their siloed data from cloud-based repositories and on-premises data centers to the Data Cloud. The more customers adopt our platform, the more data can be exchanged with other Snowflake customers, partners, data providers, and data consumers, enhancing the value of our platform for all users. We believe this network effect will help us drive our vision of the Data Cloud.
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Our platform is used globally by organizations of all sizes across a broad range of industries. As of January 31, 2022, we had 5,944 total customers, increasing from 4,139 customers as of January 31, 2021. As of January 31, 2022, our customers included 241 of the Fortune 500, based on the 2021 Fortune 500 list, and 488 of the Global 2000, based on the 2021 Forbes Global 2000 list, and those customers contributed approximately 26% and 40% of our revenue, respectively, for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2022. Each of our Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customer counts is subject to adjustments for annual updates to the Fortune 500 list by Fortune and to the Global 2000 list by Forbes, respectively, as well as acquisitions, consolidations, spin-offs, and other market activity with respect to such customers. As our customers experience the benefits of our platform, they typically expand their usage significantly, as evidenced by our net revenue retention rate, which was 178% as of January 31, 2022. The number of customers that contributed more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue increased from 77 to 184 as of January 31, 2021 and 2022, respectively.
We have achieved significant growth in recent periods. For the fiscal years ended January 31, 2022, 2021, and 2020, our revenue was $1.2 billion, $592.0 million, and $264.7 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 106% and 124%, respectively. Our net loss was $679.9 million, $539.1 million, and $348.5 million for the fiscal years ended January 31, 2022, 2021, and 2020, respectively.
The Rise of the Data Cloud
Data exists everywhere, but is often held hostage in silos by machines, applications, networks, and clouds. In order to access the value of this data, organizations are undergoing massive digital transformation initiatives, and data is driving operations for many modern enterprises. In an effort to mobilize data, companies have invested billions of dollars in disparate on-premises systems, infrastructure clouds, and application clouds. Yet, there are a myriad of challenges associated with legacy data solutions and the data silo problem persists.
We believe the Data Cloud can enable a world without data silos, allowing organizations to effortlessly discover, access, derive insights from, and share data from a variety of sources. Customers can share and provide access to each other’s data, augment data science and machine learning algorithms with more data sets, connect global supply chains through data hubs, and create new monetization channels by connecting data providers and consumers. As the Data Cloud grows through broad adoption and increasing usage, there are enhanced benefits from greater data availability. Moving forward, we are continuing to foster these benefits through industry-specific Data Clouds and the Powered by Snowflake program.
Our Solution
Our platform is built on a cloud-native architecture that leverages the massive scalability and performance of the public cloud. Our platform allows customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, power applications, and share data across regions and public clouds. Key elements of our platform include:
• Diverse data types. Our platform integrates and optimizes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, while maintaining performance and flexibility.
• Massive scalability of data volumes. Our platform leverages the scalability and performance of the public cloud to support growing data sets without sacrificing performance.
• Multiple use cases and users simultaneously. Our platform makes compute resources dynamically available to address the demand of as many users and use cases as needed. Because the storage layer is independent of compute, the data is centralized and simultaneously accessible by many users without compromising performance or data integrity.
• Optimized price-performance. Our platform uses advanced optimizations to efficiently access only the data required to deliver the desired results. It delivers speed without the need for tuning or the expense of manually organizing data prior to use. Organizations can adjust their consumption to precisely match their needs, always optimizing for price-performance.
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• Easy to use. Our platform can be up and running in seconds and is priced based on a consumption-based business model, reducing hidden costs and ensuring customers pay only for what they use. Snowpark, our developer framework, allows developers to interact with Snowflake through various popular programming languages. This, combined with our familiar SQL-based programming model and query language, provides choice for organizations and saves time and costs to learn new skills or hire specialized analysts or data scientists.
• Delivered as a service with no overhead. Our platform is delivered as a service, eliminating the cost, time, and resources associated with managing underlying infrastructure. We deliver automated platform updates regularly with minimal planned downtime, eliminating expensive and time-consuming version and patch management. This gives customers the ability to consume more data at a lower total cost of ownership compared with other solutions.
• Multi-cloud and multi-region. Our platform is available on three major public clouds across 31 regional deployments around the world. These deployments are generally interconnected to provide a global and consistent user experience.
• Seamless and secure data sharing. Our platform enables governed and secure sharing of live data within an organization and externally across customers and partners, generally without copying or moving the underlying data. When sharing data across regions and public clouds, our platform allows customers to easily replicate data and maintain a single source of truth.
Key Benefits to our Customers
Our platform enables customers to:
• Transform into data-driven businesses. Our platform eliminates data silos, empowers secure and governed access to data, and removes data management and infrastructure complexities. This enables organizations to drive greater insights, improve products and services, and pursue new business opportunities.
• Consolidate data into a single, analytics-ready source of truth. Our platform simplifies our customers’ data infrastructure by centralizing data in an analytics-ready format. As a result, organizations are able to deliver secure, fast, and accurate decision making. It also simplifies governance and minimizes the errors, complexity, and costs associated with managing data silos.
• Increase agility and augment insights through seamless data sharing. Our platform allows customers to seamlessly share and consume live data across their organizations, and with their partners, customers, and suppliers, without moving the underlying data. Customers can also leverage the Snowflake Data Marketplace, which provides access to hundreds of live, ready-to-query third-party data sets across a wide range of categories. Through data sharing within and outside of their ecosystems, our customers are able to blend their existing data with broader context to gain deeper insights and enhance their partnerships.
• Create new monetization streams and data-driven applications. Our platform allows customers to unlock previously untapped monetization streams and create new data-driven applications. This enables organizations to better reach, engage, and retain their end customers.
• Benefit from a global multi-cloud strategy. Our platform delivers a consistent product experience across connected regions and public clouds. With a global multi-cloud strategy, organizations can optimize for the best features and functionality each public cloud provides, without becoming overly reliant on a single public cloud provider. Our customers can optimize their cloud costs, seamlessly migrate data among connected public clouds without having to alter existing security policies, and implement regional strategies, including to meet regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.
• Reduce time spent managing infrastructure. Because we deliver our platform as a service, our customers can focus on driving immediate value from their data and not on managing complex and expensive infrastructure.
• Enable greater data access through enhanced data governance. Security and governance, including the encryption of data in transit and at rest, were designed into our platform architecture. This provides customers with the confidence to share their data inside their organizations, as well as with their partners, customers, and suppliers, to unlock new insights.
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Our Growth Strategies
We intend to invest in our business to advance the Data Cloud through the adoption of our platform. Our growth strategies include:
• Innovate and advance our platform. We have a history of technological innovation, releasing new features on a regular basis and making frequent updates to our platform. We intend to continue making significant investments in research and development and hiring top technical talent to enable new use cases, strengthen our technical lead in our platform’s architecture, and increase our differentiation through enhanced data sharing capabilities. For example, in 2021 we launched Snowpark and introduced support for unstructured data which allows expanded use of our platform.
• Drive growth by acquiring new customers. We believe that nearly all organizations will eventually embrace a cloud strategy, and that the opportunity to continue growing our customer base, particularly with larger organizations and organizations with vast amounts of data, is substantial. To drive new customer growth, we intend to continue investing in sales and marketing, with a focus on replacing legacy solutions and big data offerings and providing industry-specific services.
• Drive increased usage within our existing customer base. As customers realize the benefits of our platform, they typically increase their platform consumption by processing, storing, and sharing more data. We plan to continue investing in sales and marketing, with a focus on driving more consumption on our platform to grow large customer relationships, which lead to scale and operating leverage in our business model.
• Expand our global footprint. As organizations around the world increase their public cloud adoption, we believe there is a significant opportunity to expand the use of our platform outside of North America. We continue to make investments in sales and marketing, research and development, customer support, and public cloud deployments across the EMEA, Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), and Latin America regions.
• Expand data content and data sharing across our global ecosystem. Our platform provides an innovative way for organizations to share, collaborate, and connect with data, including through the Data Marketplace. We plan to continue investing in adding new customers, partners, data providers, and data consumers to connect on our platform, and to drive market awareness of the Data Cloud.
• Grow and invest in our partner network. Our Snowflake Partner Network is comprised of system integrators, resellers, data providers, and other services partners who help accelerate the adoption of our platform, and technology partners, who help provide end-to-end solutions to our customers. We plan to continue investing in building out our partner program to drive more consumption on our platform, broaden our distribution footprint, acquire new customers, and drive greater awareness of our platform. For example, we launched our Powered by Snowflake program in 2021 to help customers and partners build, operate, and grow their applications built using Snowflake.
Our Platform
Our platform unifies data and supports a growing variety of workloads, including data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing. Customers can leverage our platform for any one of these workloads, but when taken together, it provides an integrated, end-to-end solution that delivers greater insights, faster data transformations, and improved data sharing. Delivered as a service, our platform is deployed across multiple public clouds and regions, is easy to use, and requires near-zero maintenance.
Workloads
Organizations use our platform to power the following workloads:
• Data Warehouse. Our platform provides reporting and analytics to increase business intelligence. For Data Warehouse, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Support multiple users and activities concurrently. Enable multiple activities, such as repeatable analytics, rendering of dashboards, or ad hoc explorations, such as data science model training, with flexible compute capacity, no resource contention, and no provisioning of any infrastructure.
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◦ Generate comprehensive data insights. Customers can run queries on structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data to capitalize on a more comprehensive view of their data to drive maximum insights.
◦ Simplify data governance. Gain immediate insight into data and usage patterns and set policies and configurations to maximize governance.
• Data Lake. Our platform can serve as a central data repository without trade-offs in performance, security, or data governance. It can also augment existing data lakes with seamless access to external data and open formats. For Data Lake, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Build a modern scalable data lake in the cloud. Consolidate data into one centralized place with the scalability, security, and analytical power of data warehousing in the cloud to enable real-time analytics on all data. Customers can rely on this centralized data repository to address a variety of use cases.
◦ Enact better governance and security to enable broader data access. Simplify data governance and provide rich security and controls to ensure data is managed and accessed according to regulatory and corporate requirements.
• Data Engineering. Our platform enables data engineers, IT departments, data science teams, and business analytics teams to efficiently build and manage data pipelines using SQL or other programming languages to transform raw data into actionable data for business insights. For Data Engineering, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Drive faster decision making. Ingest data and transform it in real time to ensure access to up-to-date information to drive better business outcomes.
◦ Dynamically meet peak business demands . Meet fluctuating business demands by instantly scaling resources up and down.
• Data Science. A majority of data science efforts involve transforming massive amounts of raw data at scale to enable advanced analytics, such as advanced statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. For Data Science, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Accelerate transformations across massive data sets. Store and transform data at scale with the massive scalability and performance of the public cloud.
◦ Integrate with leading data science tools and languages. Manage resources for data transformation and use leading data science tools, with the support of Scala, R, Java, and Python, to build machine learning algorithms in a single cloud platform.
• Data Application Development. Our platform can power new applications as well as enable existing applications with capabilities for reporting and analytics. For Data Application Development, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Develop analytical applications. Build data-driven applications with our platform serving as the analytical engine to provide massive scalability and insights.
◦ Embed Snowflake into existing applications. Feed data and analytics directly into business applications in the context of daily workstreams.
• Data Sharing. Our platform enables organizations to securely share, connect, collaborate, monetize, and acquire live data sets. For Data Sharing, our platform enables organizations to:
◦ Create a private data hub. Build a private data hub for employees across all parts of the organization to access, collaborate, and analyze data.
◦ Acquire data sets to enrich analytics. Leverage public data sets on our Data Marketplace to enrich insights, augment analysis, and inform machine learning algorithms.
◦ Monetize new data sets. List data sets to our Data Marketplace and tap into new monetization streams.
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◦ Invite external parties to access governed data. Invite customers, suppliers, and partners, to securely access their data to streamline operations and increase transparency.
◦ Enable data clean rooms . Our platform enables data clean rooms, allowing organizations to design their own collaborative data environment in a privacy-compliant manner.
◦ Easy data replication. Our platform allows for easy replication of data for multiple users across multiple public cloud providers and regions without compromising data integrity and governance, enabling our customers and their users to rely on a single source of truth.
Architecture
Our platform was built from the ground up to take advantage of the cloud, and is built on an innovative multi-cluster, shared data architecture. It consists of three independently scalable layers deployed and connected globally across public clouds and regions:
• Centralized storage. The storage layer is based on scalable cloud storage and can manage structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It can be grown independently of compute resources, allowing for maximum scalability and elasticity, and ensures a single, persistent copy of the data. The stored data is automatically partitioned, and metadata is extracted during loading to enable efficient processing.
• Multi-cluster compute. The compute layer is designed to capitalize on the instant elasticity and performance of the public cloud. Compute clusters can be spun up and down easily within seconds, enabling our platform to retrieve the optimal data required from the storage layer to answer queries and transform data with optimized price-performance. This functionality allows a multitude of users and use cases to operate on a single copy of the data.
• Cloud services. The cloud services layer acts as the brain of the platform ensuring the different components work in unison to deliver a consistent user-friendly customer experience. It performs a variety of tasks, including security operations, system monitoring, query optimization, and metadata and state tracking throughout the platform.
This architecture is built on three major public clouds across 31 regional deployments around the world. These deployments are generally interconnected to deliver the Data Cloud, enabling a global and consistent user experience.
Our Technology
Innovation is at the core of our culture. We have developed innovative technology across our platform, including managed service, storage, query capabilities, compute model, data sharing, global infrastructure, and integrated security.
• Managed Service
◦ High availability. Within a region, all components of our platform are distributed over multiple data centers to ensure high availability. Hardware and software problems are automatically detected and addressed by the system, with full transparency to our customers.
◦ Transactions. Our platform supports full ACID compliant transactional integrity, ensuring that data remains consistent even when our platform is concurrently used by many users and use cases.
◦ Data availability and recovery. Our platform provides customers the ability to replicate data across various deployments, create point-in-time consistent snapshots of data, and view or recover deleted or changed data over a configured period of time. This allows customers to avoid difficult trade-offs between high recovery times, data loss, or downtime.
• Storage
◦ Columnar data. Our platform stores data in a proprietary columnar representation, which optimizes the performance of analytical and reporting queries. It also provides high compression ratios, resulting in economic benefits for customers.
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◦ Micro-partitioning. Our platform automatically partitions all data it stores without the need for user specification or configuration. It creates small files called “micro partitions” based on size, enabling optimizations in query processing to retrieve only the data relevant for user queries, simplifying user administration and enhancing performance.
◦ Metadata. When data is ingested, our platform automatically extracts and stores metadata to speed up query processing. It does so by collecting data distribution information for all columns in every micro-partition.
◦ Semi-structured and unstructured data. In addition to structured, relational data, our platform supports semi-structured data, including JSON, Avro, and Parquet, and unstructured data, including PDF documents, screenshots, recordings, and images. Data in these formats can be ingested and queried with performance comparable to a relational, structured representation.
• Query Capabilities. Our platform is engineered to query petabytes of data. It implements support for a large subset of the ANSI SQL standard for read operations and data modification operations. Our platform provides additional features, including:
◦ Time travel. Our platform keeps track of all changes happening to a table, which enables customers to query previous versions based on their preferences. Customers can query as of a relative point in time or as of an absolute point in time. This has a broad array of use cases for customers, including error recovery, time-based analysis, and data quality checks.
◦ Cloning. Our architecture enables us to offer zero-copy cloning, an operation by which entire tables, schemas, or databases can be duplicated—or cloned—without having to copy or duplicate the underlying data. Our platform leverages the separation between cloud services and storage to be able to track independent clones of objects sharing the same physical copy of the underlying data. This enables a variety of customer use cases such as making copies of production data for data scientists, creating custom snapshots in time, or testing data pipelines.
• Compute Model. Our platform offers a variety of capabilities to operate on data, from ingestion to transformation, as well as rich query and analysis. Our compute services are primarily presented to users in one of two models, either through explicit specification of compute clusters or through a number of serverless services.
◦ Compute Clusters. Our platform exposes compute clusters as a core concept. Our customers are able to create as few or as many compute clusters as they want and specify compute capacity at tiered levels. These clusters can be configured to run only when needed, with cluster instantiation operations typically completed in seconds. Compute clusters can also be configured as a multi-cluster warehouse in which our platform can automatically add and remove additional instances of a given cluster to address variations in query demands. This gives us the ability to offer extremely high levels of concurrency with a simple configuration specification.
◦ Serverless services. We offer a number of additional services that automatically provide the capacity our customers require. For example, our data ingestion service automatically ingests data from cloud storage and allocates compute capacity based on the amount of data ingested; our clustering service continuously rearranges the physical layout of data to ensure conformity with clustering key specifications, improving performance; our materialized views service propagates changes from underlying tables to views that have materialized subsets or summaries; our replication service moves data between regions or clouds; and our search optimization service analyzes changes in data, maintains information that speeds up lookup queries, and accelerates queries performing lookups of specific values.
• Data Sharing. In our platform, data sharing is defined through access control and not through data movement. As such, the data consumer sees no latency relative to updates from the data provider, and incurs no cost to move or transform data to make it usable.
• Global Infrastructure
◦ Database replication. Our platform enables customers to replicate data from one region or public cloud to another region or public cloud while maintaining transactional integrity.
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◦ Business continuity. Our platform enables failing over and failing back a database and redirecting clients transparently across regions or public clouds. This provides an integrated and global disaster recovery capability.
◦ Global listings for sharing. Our platform enables a listing to be published globally to access consumers across regions or public clouds.
• Built-in Security. We built our platform with security as a core tenet. Our platform provides a number of capabilities for customers to confidently use our platform while preserving the security requirements of their organizations, including:
◦ Authentication. Our platform supports rich authentication capabilities, including federated authentication with a variety of identity providers, as well as support for multi-factor authentication.
◦ Access control. Our platform provides a fine-grained security model based on role-based access control. It provides granular privileges on system objects and actions.
◦ Data encryption. Our platform encrypts all data, both in motion and at rest, and simplifies operations by providing automatic re-keying of data. It also supports customer-managed keys, where an additional layer of encryption is provided by keys controlled by customers, giving them the ability to control access to the data.
Sales and Marketing
We sell our platform primarily through our direct sales team, which consists of field sales and inside sales professionals segmented by customer industry, size, and region. Our direct sales team is primarily focused on new customer acquisitions and driving increased usage of our platform by existing customers. The breadth of our platform allows us to engage at every level of an organization, including data analysts and data engineers through our self-service model and senior executives through our direct sales team. The substantial majority of our global sales and marketing efforts are carried out by teams located in North America. Outside of North America, we have dedicated direct sales teams for the EMEA and APJ regions for organizations of all sizes.
Many organizations initially adopt our platform through a self-service trial on our website. We deploy a range of marketing strategies to drive traffic to our website and usage of our platform. Our marketing team combines the creation of inbound demand with direct marketing, business development, and efforts targeted at business and technology leaders.
Partnerships
Our partnership strategy is focused on delivering complete end-to-end solutions for our customers, driving general awareness of our platform, and broadening our distribution and reach to new customers. Our Snowflake Partner Network is a global program that manages our business relationships with a broad-based network of companies. Our partnerships consist of channel partners, system integrators, data providers, and other technology partners. Collectively, these partners help us source leads, execute transactions, and provide training and implementation of our platform. Our system integrator partners help make the adoption of and migration to our platform easier by providing implementations, value-added professional services, managed services, and resale services. Our technology partners provide strategic value to our customers by providing software tools, such as data loading, business intelligence, machine learning, data governance, and security, as well as data sets on our Data Marketplace, to augment the capabilities of our platform. We continue to invest in formal alliances with the leading consulting, data management, and implementation service providers to help our customers migrate their legacy database solutions to the cloud. Over time, we expect our partner network to drive more customers and consumption to our platform.
Research and Development
Our research and development organization is responsible for the design, development, testing, and delivery of new technologies, features, integrations, and improvements of our platform. It is also responsible for operating and scaling our platform, including the underlying public cloud infrastructure. Many of our research and development employees are currently working remotely. As our research and development employees return to an office, we expect them to be located primarily in or around Bellevue, Washington; Berlin, Germany; San Mateo, California; Toronto, Canada; and Warsaw, Poland.
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Our research and development organization consists of teams specializing in software engineering, user experience, product management, data science, technical program management, and technical writing. As of January 31, 2022, we had 788 employees in our research and development organization. We intend to continue to invest in our research and development capabilities to expand our platform.
Our Competition
The markets we serve are highly competitive and rapidly evolving. With the introduction of new technologies and innovations, we expect the competitive environment to remain intense. Our competition includes the following:
• large, well-established, public cloud providers that generally compete in all of our markets, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP);
• less-established public and private cloud companies with products that compete in some of our markets; and
• other established vendors of legacy database solutions or big data offerings.
We believe we compete favorably based on the following competitive factors:
• ability to provide and innovate around an architecture that is purpose-built for the cloud;
• ability to efficiently and seamlessly ingest diverse data types in one location at scale;
• ability to drive business value and ROI;
• ability to support multiple use cases in one platform, including various industry-specific use cases;
• ability to provide seamless and secure access of data to many users simultaneously;
• ability to seamlessly and securely share and move data across public clouds or regions;
• ability to provide a consistent user experience across multiple public cloud providers;
• ability to provide pricing transparency and optimized price-performance benefits;
• ability to elastically scale up and scale down in high-intensity use cases;
• ease of deployment, implementation, and use;
• performance, scalability, and reliability;
• security and governance; and
• quality of service and customer satisfaction.
See the section titled “Risk Factors” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to competition.
Seasonality
Historically, we have received a higher volume of orders from new and existing customers in the fourth fiscal quarter of each year. As a result, we have historically seen higher collections and consequently higher non-GAAP free cash flow in the first and fourth fiscal quarters of each year, and our sequential growth in remaining performance obligations has historically been highest in the fourth fiscal quarter of each year. For more information, including a definition of non-GAAP free cash flow and a reconciliation of free cash flow to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated in accordance with GAAP, see the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.”
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Human Capital Resources
General
As of January 31, 2022, we had 3,992 employees operating across 23 countries. None of our employees are represented by a labor union with respect to his or her employment. In certain countries in which we operate, such as France, we are subject to, and comply with, local labor law requirements, which include works councils and industry-wide collective bargaining agreements. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.
Location
We are a Delaware corporation with a globally distributed workforce. We recruit and hire employees in jurisdictions around the world based on a range of factors, including the available talent pool, the type of work being performed, the relative cost of labor, regulatory requirements and costs, and other considerations. Since April 2020, the vast majority of our workforce has been working remotely. Although we have recently opened most of our offices for voluntary use and we expect many of our employees to return to physical offices during the fiscal year ending January 31, 2023, the nature and extent of that return is uncertain.
Culture and Engagement
We consider our culture and employees to be important to our success. Our culture is driven by our core company values:
• Put Customers First : We only succeed when our customers succeed, so we focus on what matters most to them.
• Integrity Always : We are open, honest, and respectful.
• Think Big : We set big goals that will make a positive impact and a lasting difference.
• Be Excellent : We hold ourselves to the highest standards to achieve quality and excellence in everything we do.
• Make Each Other the Best : We bring ideas and people together through respect and collaboration.
• Get it Done : We follow through on our commitments and deliver results.
• Own It : We hold ourselves accountable at all times.
• Embrace Each Other’s Differences : We are mindful that everyone has different experiences, and we use our differences to strengthen who we are.
We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team, and we measure employee performance against our company values. We are dependent on our management, highly-skilled software engineers, and sales personnel, and it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain valuable employees. To facilitate attraction and retention, we strive to provide opportunities for our employees to grow and develop in their careers, supported by strong compensation and benefits programs, including equity-based compensation that is designed to align our employees’ interests with those of our stockholders.
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property rights are important to the success of our business. We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, and other contractual protections, to protect our intellectual property rights, including our proprietary technology, software, know-how, and brand. We use open source software in our platform.
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As of January 31, 2022, we held 261 issued U.S. patents and had 250 U.S. patent applications pending. We also held 85 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions. Our issued patents are scheduled to expire between January 2024 and July 2041. As of January 31, 2022, we held 22 registered trademarks in the United States, and also held 174 registered or protected trademarks in foreign jurisdictions. We continually review our development efforts to assess the existence and patentability of new intellectual property.
Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets, as well as contractual protections to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel, creation of new services, features and functionality, and frequent enhancements to our platform are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position.
We control access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through the use of internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers, and partners. We require our employees, consultants, and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements, and we control and monitor access to our software, documentation, proprietary technology, and other confidential information. Our policy is to require all employees and independent contractors to sign agreements assigning to us any inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, developments, processes, and other intellectual property generated by them on our behalf and under which they agree to protect our confidential information. In addition, we generally enter into confidentiality agreements with our customers and partners. See the section titled “Risk Factors” for a more comprehensive description of risks related to our intellectual property.
Available Information
Our website address is www.snowflake.com. Information found on, or accessible through, our website is not a part of, and is not incorporated into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We file electronically with the SEC our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. We make available on our website at www.snowflake.com, free of charge, copies of these reports and other information as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.