Conference season is in full swing! If you’re in the data warehousing and data cloud world at all, then you know we have a big one coming up next week. That’s right, Snowflake Summit 2025 officially kicks off next week from June 2-5 (that’s Monday to Thursday for the date-challenged like myself) in San Francisco.

As it happens, this year’s Snowflake Summit appears to be a doosy. With over 15 tracks and 500 sessions, there’s a little something for everyone to enjoy. Success stories from industry leaders, hands-on sessions to level up your Snowflake skills and everything in between.

Then there’s the Opening, Platform and Builder keynotes. The Platform keynote will include all the main product announcements. The Builder keynote dives into more technical detail on the Platform announcements and features some live demos. They also have the Builders Hub and Platform Peak for those who want to get their hands on some of those shiny new features. Oh, and there’s the Basecamp Expo Hall, Snowbash and … a fireside chat featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy? Say no more.

This is all a long way of saying that there’s lots to look forward to at Snowflake Summit. As a long-time Snowflake Select Partner in the US, Australia and Europe, our team has plenty of thoughts when it comes to what they are personally excited about for this year’s Snowflake Summit. Here’s what they said:

Chris Soule, Data Strategy Director, Americas

“What excites me is that Snowflake typically unveils additional features and abilities to enable practitioners to do even more in their data cloud and make our lives easier. In terms of big ideas, I’m hoping to learn more about how Snowflake is making AI even easier in their Data Cloud. I’m specifically interested in the following two sessions:

• Inside Snowflake Cortex AI: Gen AI and Enterprise Intelligence Capabilities: This will explore how Snowflakes AI capabilities can further help our clients.
• What’s New: Eliminating Data Silos with Horizon Catalog and Internal Marketplace: This dives into how Snowflake is making data governance and mesh concepts even easier for clients.

Finally, since Snowflake is quickly expanding it’s feature set and usefulness, I am looking forward to seeing how all the new features they come out with will assist our clients on their data journeys. If you’re attending Snowflake Summit this year or want to talk in more detail about Snowflake in general, feel free to email me at chris.soule@interworks.com.”

Chris Hastie, Data Lead

“I shared thoughts on LinkedIn about DevDay, which is the final day of Snowflake Summit. In general, my favourite part of these conferences is exploring the main floor. I love seeing the data ecosystem shift each year, meeting new players and seeing how old ones have pivoted. Tools I might have ruled out a year ago suddenly demonstrate cool new functionality that catches my eye, or new players pop up to introduce whole new areas to explore.

A few years ago we rarely discussed many different areas of governance, then a few huge players entered the market and the whole thing kicked off. That’s just one example, but we’ve seen it time and time again. And exploring the trade floor each year let’s you truly feel that growth. For me, that’s easily the highlight.

Of course the keynotes and feature announcements are another huge highlight. One of my favourite things is when I can learn about new functionality in a keynote and immediately go and attend breakout sessions that dive under the hood. Even better when there’s a hands-on lab and I can get straight to using new functionality with my own data.”

Aaron Carmichael, Data Engineer

“Ivan Dosev is actually working on a technical implementation blog about this, so you’ll likely see some more about this pretty soon, but the general idea is that after buying Datavolo, Snowflake now offers a service called Openflow that actually lives outside of Snowflake on your Cloud infrastructure. This service then handles Extract/Load for different data sources like you’d see from other ETL partners:

• Pros: Extract/Load without buying a whole new tool. Less IT overhead and management needed since it’s all a single platform.
• Cons/Unknowns: Complexity to set up. Setting up Openflow involves configuring a bit of your own cloud architecture, so it’s a bit more involved.

No clue what pricing implications look like right now. Logically, it’d be cheaper to use this than invest in another platform, but I don’t know for certain how easy it’d be to quickly run up an AWS bill or something similar.”

Taylor Miles, Data Engineer

“Last year’s Snowflake Summit happened right around the time of a front-page data breach that involved their platform. While the company with which the breach occurred shouldered the blame due to their lapse in security practices, Snowflake’s name popped up quite a bit in those headlines as, ultimately, that’s the fortress that was Trojan Horse-d.

In response, Snowflake has pushed out notable changes in their security features, such as the Trust Center, and they are pushing customers into modern security practices (which we are loving over here at InterWorks). Now that a year has passed and they’ve had time to prepare, I am looking forward to hearing about the continued evolution in best practices, lessons learned and roadmap for keeping data secure.

Here are some sessions on that front that piqued my interest:

• Best Practices for Protecting Sensitive Data and Simplifying Compliance
• The First Line of Defense: Secure Network Connectivity Strategies for Snowflake
• Best Practices for Protecting Against Credential Theft and Data Exfiltration

AI remains the focus for the data world in 2025, unsurprisingly, as it’s the shiny new car that everyone is, and should be, talking about. With that, I am keen to learn how Snowflake and its practitioners are governing and securing their data to enable a safe and sustainable partnership with AI. Despite its advances, there is still heavy reliance on fundamental best practices around data to be truly useful.

As environmental and pricing concerns surface, an eye toward the software adage “garbage in, garbage out” becomes more and more important. Data Governance is a necessary, though often neglected, tenant of the modern data ecosystem. So, what’s the Snowflake Summit have to say on the matter? Under the Session Track: “Governance, Security, and Discovery,” the following sessions caught my eye:

• Governing Data in an Era of AI and Consumer Consent
• How to Manage Data Quality, Security and Cost Visibility for AI

If I sound skeptical or disinterested in the hype around the AI revolution and perhaps too risk-averse, well, blame my editor: Gemini. Just kidding. In reality, I respect what AI can do, but we owe ourselves to be mature and meticulous in its adoption given its disruptive and near-magical nature. Wanting what’s best for our clients means advocating both for the flashy, convenient self-driving features and the seat belt and brake and airbag enhancements that should come along with it.”

Justin Lemmon, Data Lead

“100% agreed with Aaron and Taylor above on OpenFlow and governance + security. I’d tack on Horizon Catalog and new features + integrations to the governance point. I’d add AI-focused pieces (keynote is with Sam Altman, and I’m sure that’ll gather a lot of attention). We’ll be interested in Cortex, Document AI, and implementation trends and innovations there.

Also of note are some tracks about related ethics and governance. Open formats, Apache Iceberg and Snowflake Open Catalog are big topics worth exploring. I’m curious what all they are doing there, along with other interoperability advancements.

I’d be on the lookout for cost optimization strategies, as well. At Data Council we saw several companies focusing exclusively on that, and I want to see how Snowflake responds and if they implement new features around that.”

Dakota Murdock, Data Engineer

“I’m looking forward to hearing from Sam Altman in the keynote about how AI will continue to grow in its impact on everything we do. The opportunity to hear from a visionary and innovator like him is special.

While AI will be a common thread throughout the conference, as someone who spends my days building practical solutions for clients, I’m especially focused on technical topics where the rubber meets the road. Two key areas for me are security and data integration.

With security, I want to make sure the platforms I build and work on for clients are not just performant but also follow the latest in security best practices. I’ll be digging into the latest in private connectivity options, network policy design, credential protection, data exfiltration safeguards and continuous auditing with Trust Center.

On the data integration side, I’m carving out time for multiple sessions covering Snowflake’s new Data Integration service. I’m excited to understand how this native service handles everything from structured, unstructured, batch or streaming jobs without relying on third-party tools. I’m focused on how we can start using it to streamline client architectures and cut down on complexity and costs.”

Brooks Barth, Analytics Lead

“For starters, I’m stoked on Snowflake Summit being a core Modern Data Stack conference. Each year, it grows in momentum as more people join the Snowflake ecosystem. From what I can see, there’s some great vendor representation this year, and I’m particularly excited about Sigma being present as it’s shaping up to be a compelling BI tool in our current reference architecture. From a more platform and feature-specific standpoint, I’m interested in exploring Cortex as a SQL-first AI / RAG engine for structured and unstructured data.”

Want to Go Further with Snowflake Post-Summit?

There will be a lot of new information to process once Snowflake Summit ends. The question then is where will you go with Snowflake next? If you’re looking for the ideal strategic partner, InterWorks’ is here to help! Even if you’re completely new to Snowflake, we can get help determine if it’s the right fit for you and even conduct a Snowflake Rapid Start. Whatever you’re need, we’d love to chat. Learn more about our Snowflake services at our Snowflake partner page.