SNOW is reportedly moving forward with its acquisition of Observe, a cloud-based observation platform company. If the deal goes through, it is expected to be worth approximately $10 billion (about 1.44 trillion won), making it SNOW's largest startup acquisition to date.
The monitoring platform Obushev provides tools for real-time detection of system latency or server failures, and assists engineers in problem analysis through a built-in chatbot. While existing solutions primarily offer SQL-based analysis capabilities, Obushev's unique feature lies in its proprietary OPAL syntax, enabling time-series analysis. This allows the platform to track log errors over specific time periods or perform comparative analysis with previous periods.
Of particular note, Obushev also optimized the platform for scenarios such as security threat detection in the Snowflake environment, system optimization to reduce infrastructure costs, and application debugging based on Snowflake's "Snowpark Container Service." The platform itself is built on Snowflake's data cloud, and telemetry data collected from customer environments is also stored through Snowflake Storage.
This acquisition negotiation took place after the technological synergies between the two companies were clearly demonstrated. Snowflake, through his venture capital fund, participated in Obsession's most recent funding round, when Obsession raised $156 million (approximately 224 billion Korean won). At that time, Obsession's annual revenue tripled year-on-year, and its number of enterprise clients doubled. The proposed acquisition is more than three times the company's total funding since its founding in 2017, indicating recognition of its growth potential.
If the acquisition is finalized, Snowflake will directly compete with existing market leaders such as Splunk. Snowflake claims its solutions are more cost-effective than Cisco's Splunk platform. Furthermore, it highlights operational simplification and automation as key advantages.
This news comes after Snowflake's recent acquisition of database migration startup Datometry. The startup possesses technology that helps users easily migrate applications from external platforms to Snowflake. By expanding its acquisitions of startups, Snowflake's strategy to increase its platform's influence in the cloud data market is becoming increasingly clear.
