Snowflake Computing has launched its first official partner program to help customers find qualified partners that can work with them to accelerate and maximize the benefits of the company’s technology.

The Snowflake Solution Partner Program includes “expertise in strategies, architectures, design principles and best practices” in big data and analytics to ensure customers can deploy Snowflake to help solve their data analytics challenges, according to the company.

Jon Bock, Snowflake’s vice president of product marketing, tells Channel Partners that although the company has been working with implementation partners for some time, it previously did not have a program specifically for SI partners.

“Snowflake is creating this program to support the rapid growth of our customer base and interest from partners in a way that will scale and better equip our partners to make those customers successful,” he said. “We see the solution partner community as a key element of our success going forward because they bring the expertise to help customers integrate Snowflake successfully into their data solutions.”

Snowflake, a cloud data warehousing company, launched the program with more than 30 partners. They are SIs of various sizes that have specialized expertise helping customers implement data analytics offerings, Bock said.

Program benefits include: training on Snowflake technology, use cases and best practices through Snowflake’s SnowCamp training curriculum; opportunities for joint marketing with Snowflake, including joint branding, joint collateral and marketing activities; resources to support implementation and go-to-market efforts; and discounted access to Snowflake products for learning and development purposes.{ad}

“Cloud data solutions are a new area for many customers and require new ways of thinking and designing solutions — you can’t take full advantage of the cloud just by lifting and shifting on-premises solutions into a cloud platform,” Bock said. “A key part of Snowflake’s program is access to education and resources that can help partners extend their existing expertise to incorporate best practices and design principles for using a cloud data warehouse. Because of how quickly technology and use cases for cloud data warehousing have been evolving, many customers struggle with things such as getting their data into the cloud and budgeting for cloud solutions. Snowflake Solution Partners, leveraging the training and education from this new program, can help customers with questions like those.”

Snowflake’s data warehouse built for the cloud delivers the “performance, concurrency and simplicity needed to support today’s diverse data and analytics,” the company said.