Snowflake Computing, the data warehouse built for the cloud, today announced its general availability on Microsoft Azure in Europe.

The expansion mirrors the rising customer demand for Snowflake on Azure in Europe, matched by large organisations’ desire for flexibility in choosing a cloud platform that best serves their business and customers.

Snowflake leverages Azure infrastructure services for data storage and query processing. In addition, Snowflake will integrate with Azure services such as Azure Data Lake Store and Microsoft Power BI. The platform also employs several new features, including accelerated networking and storage soft delete.

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EMEA focus

Snowflake’s deployment on Azure will empower European customers to leverage the flexible cloud strategy enterprises are looking for.

“As more companies move their data and analytics workloads to the cloud, the demand for a cloud-built data warehouse continues to grow,” said Snowflake co-founder and CTO, Benoit Dageville. “Each organisation has different business requirements, and as a customer-centric company, we want to continue offering the flexibility to choose a cloud provider and region to meet our customers’ business needs.”

This latest announcement will continue to support Snowflake customers with operations in the EU that want to keep their EU data local. Local availability provides customers fast, low-latency access to their data, while accelerating their global data initiatives by satisfying their country-specific data needs.

In addition, to further empower international users, Snowflake has recently introduced collation support in preview to help customers specify rules on how data is sorted and compared. The new collation feature allows users to specify these rules based on different character sets for different languages, case-sensitivity, and additional options.

Corey Sanders, Corporate Vice President for Azure Compute at Microsoft Corp, said: “In September, Snowflake successfully launched on Microsoft Azure in the US. Today I am excited to announce the launch of Snowflake in Europe, providing European customers the same outstanding user experience of Snowflake on Microsoft Azure. Through this collaboration, customers will benefit from Snowflake’s performance, concurrency and flexibility on Azure.”

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Customer case study

Uniper, an international energy company located in Düsseldorf, Germany is using Snowflake as a central data lake in its Data Analytics Platform on Microsoft Azure. With Snowflake, Uniper will be able to manage data from more than 100 sources, including ETRMs, SAP, DWHs and IoT data from power stations enabling the business to react better and faster to the market and improve energy trading.

Uniper’s VP Data Integration Rene Greiner said: “With Uniper’s transformation into a data-driven organisation, the role of data is growing exponentially. Being able to handle high volume of data efficiently and cost-effectively is a key success criteria for us. We’re happy to have Snowflake as a partner on our platform and I’m convinced that our partnership will enable the continued success of Uniper’s data journey.”