Snowflake Acquisition Expands Legacy Data Conversion Offerings

Snowflake’s purchase of the popular SnowConvert suite of data migration tools from Mobilize.net will provide partners and customers with advanced capabilities for moving legacy databases to the Snowflake data cloud.

Data cloud service provider Snowflake has struck a deal to buy the SnowConvert suite of data migration tools from Mobilize.net in a move that will expand Snowflake’s technology offerings for moving legacy databases to the Snowflake data cloud platform.

The move will provide Snowflake partners with additional capabilities to help customers move legacy data and applications to Snowflake.

“One of our key objectives at Snowflake is to make it as fast and simple as possible for our customers and partners to unlock value from data. For many organizations, that starts with the efficient migration of their legacy databases and applications to the data cloud,” said Ted Brackin, Snowflake vice president of professional services, in a statement.

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Over the last year Snowflake has expanded the breadth of tools and services that it provides to partners and customers for moving legacy data and applications to the Snowflake platform and for developing new cloud-native applications that work with Snowflake-stored data. In November the company announced the general availability of Snowpark for Python and native support for the open-source application framework developed by Streamlit, which Snowflake bought in March 2022 for $800 million.

“With the acquisition of SnowConvert, we can help more customers, partners and more broadly our Snowflake partner network move more data and applications into the data cloud, enabling customers to obtain faster value from their investment in Snowflake sooner,” Brackin said.

Snowflake did not disclose the cost of the acquisition. Closing of the acquisition is subject to required regulatory approvals and other closing conditions, Snowflake said.

Mobilize.net also said that the company’s application migration business unit is being acquired by Growth Acceleration Partners, an Austin, Texas-based strategic technology solutions provider.

A major challenge with moving legacy database workloads to the cloud with minimal time and effort is converting database application code to the cloud platform. Snowflake partnered with Mobilize.net in 2020 and made SnowConvert a preferred solution for moving customer workloads to Snowflake – the toolkit has been used to convert more than 1.5 billion lines of code, according to Snowflake.

SnowConvert uses what Snowflake called sophisticated automation techniques that reduce the need for manual coding and ensures that data migration projects stay on track. The tools use built-in analysis capabilities at a data type and procedure level and match databases to Snowflake’s native types.

In addition to legacy database conversions SnowConvert converts workloads written in Scala and Python for transfer to Snowflake’s Snowpark developer environment.

“To ensure organizations can monetize all their data and generate the insights and services that differentiate their businesses, they need the speed and flexibility that a modern data platform provides,” said Tom Button, CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Mobilize.Net, in a statement. “By joining forces with Snowflake, customers will have seamless access to the premier suite of tools for migrating their data to Snowflake’s platform, so they can tap into the speed and agility of the Data Cloud sooner.”

Snowflake said the SnowConvert acquisition will also expand Snowflake’s professional services footprint in Costa Rica, Columbia and Bellevue, Wash.