Snowflake takes aim at legacy data workloads with SnowConvert AI migration tools

Snowflake is hoping to win business with a new tool for migrating old workloads, SnowConvert AI, that it claims can help enterprises move their data, data warehouses, business intelligence (BI) reports, and code to its platform without increasing complexity.

Powered by Snowflake’s Cortex AI Agents, the suite can halve the time taken to migrate workloads, the company said.

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SnowConvertAI includes three tools: an AI-powered migration assistant, AI-powered code verification, and AI-powered data validation. While the AI-powered migration assistant will help enterprises move data to Snowflake from other data warehouses such as Oracle, Teradata, and Google BigQuery or from other cloud data platforms, the other two tools will help in automatically converting and validating code, ETL tools, and BI reports.

Marlanna Bozicevich, research analyst at IDC, said, “By automating code conversion from legacy systems, SnowConvert significantly reduces the time, cost, and risk associated with migrating to Snowflake.”

Typically, enterprises could encounter challenges such as schema mismatches, code incompatibilities, data corruption, and workflow disruptions during data migration.

SnowConvert AI’s code verification tool reduces manual review time by providing detailed explanations and remediation suggestions for conversion errors directly within development environments, Bozicevich said.

The fact that SnowCovert AI is free will attract enterprises, as high costs in other areas have been a major pain point for Snowflake customers, she said.

The Futurum Group’s lead for data and analytics practice, Bradley Shimmin, said the automated data validation tool will drive value for enterprises as they typically have to test that the logic, transformations, and operations are correctly translated to the new platform’s syntax and semantics manually.

But enterprises may be drawn to other vendors offering their own data migration services, including Informatica, which was recently acquired by Salesforce, or cloud services providers, such as AWS and Microsoft.

However, the most comparable to SnowConvert AI, according to Bozicevich, is Databtricks’ BladeBridge-driven tool, which offers AI-powered insights into the scope of conversion, configurable code transpiling, LLM-powered conversion, and easy validation of migrated systems.

Constellation Research principal analyst Michael Ni described the launch of SnowConvert AI as a “land-grab” strategy for Snowflake.

“Snowflake isn’t just courting cloud budgets. It’s going after prospects and their workloads who feel stranded on older systems. Free SnowConvert AI weaponizes migration as a go-to-market strategy and makes modernization too easy to ignore,” Ni added.

SnowConvert AI’s AI-powered code verification and data validation tool are in preview. The company expects to release the data migration assistant soon, it said.

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