The thing to keep in mind is that leadership in data management lasts about 5 years, definitely less than 10. An (incomplete but representative) timeline:
- late 90s: Early DWs like Redbrick
- early 2000s: Oracle, Teradata
- late 2000s: Shared-nothing Data Warehouses (Vertica, Aster Data, Greenplum) - bought up by Teradata, EMC, HP
- early 2010s: Hadoop and Hive
- late 2010s: Redshift and cloud DBs
- early 2020s: Snowflake
- late 2020s: probably something else...
All these technologies felt they were here to stay at the time, but they didn't. Will Snowflake be the exception? Maybe, but the odds are not nearly as great as their valuation implies.
- late 90s: Early DWs like Redbrick
- early 2000s: Oracle, Teradata
- late 2000s: Shared-nothing Data Warehouses (Vertica, Aster Data, Greenplum) - bought up by Teradata, EMC, HP
- early 2010s: Hadoop and Hive
- late 2010s: Redshift and cloud DBs
- early 2020s: Snowflake
- late 2020s: probably something else...
All these technologies felt they were here to stay at the time, but they didn't. Will Snowflake be the exception? Maybe, but the odds are not nearly as great as their valuation implies.