This week’s Snowflake Summit is drawing attention to Snowflake Inc.’s strategies for enabling artificial intelligence on vast amounts of data.

During the Summit, the company held its Investor Day, where it laid out its strategies for enabling AI on its vast amounts of data that it manages and hosts on behalf of customers.

“They felt that it was a very convincing strategy, very compelling strategy,” said Frank Slootman (pictured), chairman and chief executive officer of Snowflake Inc.

The focus on AI was a key topic throughout the day, and the conference content helped attendees grasp the breadth and depth of Snowflake’s strategy.

“The conference content helps … them understand the vastness of the strategy and how far we’ve come,” Slootman added. “You get to see it, touch it and really assess the reality of everything.”

Slootman spoke with industry analyst Dave Vellante at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the company’s strategies for enabling AI and its optimized database engine, integrated system and ecosystem growth. (* Disclosure below.)

Expansion into new markets: Snowflake’s multi-layered approach

One of the challenges addressed during the conference was the expansion into new markets and competing with other players in the field. What sets Snowflake apart from the competition? Its multi-layered approach, according to Slootman, which includes infrastructure elasticity, live data management, a complete workload enablement layer, a programmability platform called Snowpark, a marketplace, and a transactional model for monetizing data and applications.

By embracing both data engineers and software engineers, Snowflake aims to address a broader audience and provide a comprehensive solution in the cloud. When asked what makes Snowflake the best, Slootman attributed it to the company’s extraordinary optimized database engine.

“Fundamentally, the database is superlative,” he said. “We bring that to every single workload … creating opportunities for extraordinary performance, economics, never mind the governance and simplification operationally.”

During the interview, Slootman also detailed the intricacies of Snowflake’s integrated system, emphasizing “the magic” of its consistency and coherence across different data types and storage platforms.

“We have to support all the different user types on the data cloud,” he said. “You’re interacting with the exact same engine, the exact same governance layer. It just means you engage with us differently based on how you want to do things.”

Growing the ecosystem: Snowflake’s native apps framework and democratizing software development

Also a key point of discussion was Snowflake’s ecosystem and the company’s efforts to grow it, with Slootman highlighting its native apps framework and the goal of setting up a renaissance in software development by lowering the entry barriers for building, publishing and monetizing applications. With the marketplace and the ability to use commit dollars to purchase data on apps, Snowflake aims to democratize software development and provide opportunities for startups and individuals to thrive.

Regarding supply chain management, Snowflake resolves the challenge of complete visibility across the supply chain, bringing together independent entities and enabling data sharing in minutes, according to Slootman. He also emphasized the benefits of Snowflake’s elasticity for running short burst scenarios and the ease of scaling compute and data resources for supply chain operations.

The interview also touched on Snowflake’s ability to integrate with various external systems, such as Blue Yonder, a legacy company replatforming on Snowflake and RelationalAI. Containerizing legacy engines and utilizing Snowflake’s database engine as the backend can provide a consistent and fully governed data platform, according to Slootman.

“This is such a great time to be alive in this industry,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this for decades. All of a sudden we were in this place where the acceleration is at warp speed.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit. Neither Snowflake, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE