Former Microsoft, Juniper Exec Lands at Snowflake Computing

Microsoft (MSFT) veteran Bob Muglia has turned up at San Mateo, California-based Snowflake Computing as the company's new CEO. The 2-year-old startup is develops data warehousing products and has brought Muglia on to lead the charge into its next wave of cloud-based data warehouse services.

Muglia spent 23 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of the Microsoft Server and Tools business, before jumping ship to join Juniper Networks as a vice president. His time at Juniper was short-lived, though, and Muglia left the networking vendor in December 2013.

In a blog post as the Snowflake's new CEO, Muglia detailed his background as part of the Microsoft technical talent pool before diving in to talk about the importance of cloud services.

"We’ve seen the emergence of business intelligence and data warehousing. These tools have provided unprecedented insight into business, enabling data-driven decision-making," Muglia wrote. "More recently, the dual trends of mobility and the cloud are enabling entirely new types of solutions. Cloud services generate vast repositories of data that can reveal usage patterns and customer preference far beyond what was possible before. The need to gain insight into this data is more important than ever."

Customers are looking for such solutions, he added. He indicated that many companies are taking the data warehouse approach of hosting "old, on-premise" solutions in the cloud, but he also stated they are limited because they were not designed for the distributed cloud environments organizations are using today. On the other hand, offerings like those based on Apache Hadoop solve the Big Data problem, but they weren't designed to do data warehousing.

That leads to the problem Snowflake Computing is hoping to solve.

"The ultimate opportunity to gain business insight into modern applications is to build a platform service that was designed from the start to bring data warehousing, the cloud, and semi-structured data together," Muglia wrote. "This is what we’re creating at Snowflake Computing—the database that reimagines data warehousing as a cloud service."

Exactly when Snowflake will release their first product is unknown.