Capital One recently announced that they are launching an enterprise B2B software business focused on providing cloud and data management solutions for other companies. The idea is that they want to share their expertise and best practices developed in managing their large data sets serving over 100M customers.

The first product for that new business unit is called Capital One Slingshot, which provides data management solutions for customers of Snowflake. Overall, it is designed to help other businesses accelerate their adoption of the Snowflake Data Cloud by delivering automation, tools and analytics around usage. Capital One is a large customer of Snowflake and has five years of experience working with the Data Cloud. Now, they want to sell consulting and software services to share that insight. I think this represents another validation of the value of Snowflake and could help drive adoption, particularly for other companies in the financial services arena.

One side effect, though, is that they advertise helping companies optimize Snowflake spend. That's healthy for adoption in the long run, but may smooth out spikes in utilization growth. As an investor, my first reaction is that it could slow down revenue growth. But, I think it's important that customers feel like the ROI on their Snowflake spend is worthwhile. That will ultimately drive down costs and empower customers to move even more workloads onto Snowflake.

Finally, I think these kinds of relationships with the largest companies in industry ecosystems (Capital One is huge) provide evidence of Snowflake's savvy in the go-to-market arena. While competitors (like Databricks) may nit-pick the technical details of their platform, forming partnerships like these should help Snowflake's sales motion.