Snowflake has appointed a new president for the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) region.

Jon Robertson will join the data cloud company in early March. He will be responsible for driving the adoption and expansion of Snowflake’s Data Cloud in the local market, with a specific focus on empowering local enterprises to mobilise their data for valuable business insights.

Robertson is an experienced executive who, prior to joining Snowflake, served VMware in the APAC region for the last 14 years.

Most recently, he served as president of VMware Japan K.K., responsible for all aspects of the virtualisation, digital workplace and cloud business in Japan.

Prior to this, he was general manager at VMware ASEAN from 2012 to 2015, and served as area vice president at VMware Japan K.K. beginning in 2007.

Throughout his tenure at VMware, Robertson was involved in strategic planning, business development, and client engagement, playing a key role in growing the business to its current status in the cloud market.

Throughout his career, Robertson also held senior positions in sales and field management at EMC, SAP and M3i in Japan and APJ markets.

He is fluent in Japanese, French, and English and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Snowflake chief revenue officer Chris Degnan says, “Jon brings extensive knowledge of the local market and a strong track record of success in the cloud computing industry to both the Snowflake team and our customers in the APJ region.

“Jon’s leadership and expertise will expand Snowflakes footprint and empower local enterprises to mobilise their data for business value.”

On his appointment, Robertson says, “Data is at the core of the most successful businesses today, and local enterprises can realise deep benefits from the power of Snowflake Data Cloud.

“I’m proud to join the Snowflake team and work with clients across the region to show what’s possible for their businesses with Snowflake’s platform. I will continue the Snowflake commitment of putting customers first, within our local APJ organisations.”

Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud a global network to help organisations mobilise data with scalability, concurrency, and performance.

Inside the Data Cloud, organisations are able to unite siloed data, discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads, the company states.

The Snowflake platform powers and provides access to the Data Cloud, enabling data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing.

In 2020, the company launched its first global partner program. The Snowflake Partner Network includes resale and managed service provider programs, as well as a program designed to help technology partners expand their offerings.

Company CEO Jeremy Burton said rather than build another data lake platform, it makes more sense to make an observability platform available using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application model based on an existing cloud service.

Burton said Snowflake, which is based on a relational database running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, has already proven it can scale to ingest logs, traces and metrics. The Observe platform leverages that platform to correlate that data to monitor application and infrastructure environments in a way that provides more context than legacy tools that monitor software components and infrastructure in isolation.

The context is achieved by creating a “resource” to represent, for example, a user, a session, a shopping cart, a pod, a container, a help-desk ticket or a build. Observe then enables IT teams to also track relationships between resources in a way that the average IT administrator can query without having to tag each resource, said Burton. IT teams can also track how the attributes of a resource change over time, which Burton noted can be employed to reconstitute the state of an entire IT system at any point in time.

That approach can be applied just as easily to existing monolithic applications and emerging microservices applications because all the data required is ingested into the Snowflake service without requiring IT teams to first instrument and then update each application, added Burton.

The pricing model for Observe will be based on the amount of data stored in the AWS S3 bucket and the number of queries launched. IT teams will purchase Observe credits that are billed only when the platform is actually used, noted Burton.

While observability is a core tenant of best DevOps practices, Burton said there is a need to democratize observability in a way that allows any member of an IT team to troubleshoot any issue. There shouldn’t be a requirement to assemble every member of an IT team to diagnose an issue, said Burton, noting over time, that just aggravates developers who don’t really need to deal with, for example, an infrastructure issue.

IT teams will be provided access to dashboards that enable novice or intermediate users to quickly ascertain the root cause of an issue, while more seasoned engineers with be provided access to worksheets based on a spreadsheet-like interface through which they can manipulate data, said Burton.

Competition among providers of observability platforms is already fierce. However, as organizations look to rationalize existing legacy monitoring tools in favor of platforms that add more context, the overall size of the observability market will be measured in billions of dollars. Each IT teams will need to decide what type of platform makes the most sense for them based on costs and their preference for one capability a vendor might have that another doesn’t provide.

As the operator of a search engine, video sharing platform and email service, among many other things, Google has built itself on the success of its internal cloud systems.

But Google also offers its cloud expertise to enterprise in the form of its Google Cloud Platform. With services such as data management, hybrid and multi-cloud, AI and machine learning. The company pushes the ability to work with existing enterprise systems such as SAP, VMware, Windows and Oracle without compromising security thanks to the detection of malware and other threats.

Data analysis is another focus, with data warehousing as well as analytics driven by AI and machine learning.

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Customers include the likes of Spotify, Twitter, Toyota and Target, while coverage is worldwide, with 23 cloud regions and 70 zones.

Back in February, Google acquired big data firm Looker, integrating its offering into its own cloud systems. The $2.6bn cash deal, which was first announced in June 2019, signified Google’s ambition to catch up with rival cloud firms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure in terms of clout.

The big data business intelligence firm already featured connections with Google’s Cloud Platform and other competing offerings, allowing Google access to a wider market. Comparing quarterly results released by the companies, Google’s Q4 cloud business revenue reached $2.6bn, while Microsoft’s Q2 cloud revenue was $11.9bn.

At the time, Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, said in a blog post: “Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft, SQL Server and Teradata.”