The Snowflake IPO was a big deal, and not merely because of the company’s enormous valuation.
In 2013 Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson confidently (and accurately) declared “a stunning and irreversible trend in enterprise infrastructure.” That trend? “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last 10 years in closed-source, proprietary form.” Snowflake, a cloud-based enterprise data platform, may spell the end of that run.
Sure, we had Splunk, but Spunk squeaked through the hypothesis police before open source had found its feet, as Lightspeed partner Gaurav Gupta told me. MySQL, Apache Hadoop, MongoDB, Apache Spark... all of them (at least initially) open source.