Snowflake looks to unlock data cloud innovation with AI across Korea

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman speaks at a press conference in Seoul, Monday. (Snowflake)

US cloud software company Snowflake said Monday it will introduce a data cloud solution enhanced with artificial intelligence for customers in various industries here, in a bid to fortify its position in the Korean market.

“Korea is an extraordinarily important and strategic market to Snowflake. It’s the 10th-largest economy in the world, but it's even more important in the world of manufacturing. Korea is also an incredibly fast-growing market … where we’re working really hard,” Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman said in a press briefing in Seoul, earlier in the day.

In less than two years of business operations here, Korea has been an extremely important marketplace for the cloud computing-based data firm, and was the only country for the company’s senior vice president of product management, Christian Kleinerman, to visit twice this year, according to Snowflake Korea’s country manager Choi Ki-young.

While Monday’s briefing marked Choi’s first official schedule since taking office in July, the Korean unit head held an optimistic view about its business outlook in the domestic market.

"While the number of local clients nearly doubled from last year, we're seeing an increasing demand from more companies here. ... Our major customers include Samsung Electronics, LG Chem, Nexon and LG Uplus," he said.

Both the company’s CEO and product management chief visited Seoul this week, while it is set to hold the Korea leg of its annual Snowflake Data Cloud World Tour on Tuesday.

Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product management at Snowflake, talks about the highlights of the Korea leg of the Snowflake Data Cloud World Tour in Seoul, Monday. (Snowflake)

The event is to enable business operators to deliver data-driven strategies more effectively and suggest new ways to collaborate their business with data. Seoul is the tour’s fifth destination among 26 stops around the globe, according to the company.

At Monday’s event, Kleinerman shared highlights of the tour a day ahead of the Seoul event where the company will share several product innovations grouped into three topics: single platform; ability to deploy, distribute and monetize applications and ways; and delivery of AI and machine learning models without trade-offs.

Catching the most attention were the Snowpark container services, which were stressed as a linchpin to generative AI strategies.

Since the latest services can help a wider range of AI and machine learning models run securely in Snowflake’s data cloud platform, the senior vice president drew a blueprint to enable any form of language model to run inside Snowflake’s single platform.

By Jie Ye-eun(yeeun@heraldcorp.com)