Bob Muglia
Bob Muglia

Bob Muglia is floating in the clouds, or should we say on some snowflakes.

The longtime Microsoft veteran — who left the company in 2011 after 23 years, including a stint as the president of the $16 billion server and tools business  — is now leading Silicon Valley startup Snowflake Computing.

And today the company — based in San Mateo, Calif. — is announcing $26 million in startup funding from a group of investors that includes Sutter Hill Ventures, Wing Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

The money will be used by the company to “reinvent the data warehouse for the cloud,” the company says.

Muglia landed in the CEO role at Snowflake in June, after a 2-year stint at Juniper Networks.

“There has been shockingly little innovation in data warehousing in a decade,” said Muglia in today’s press release. “That creates a huge and largely unaddressed market opportunity—to create a data warehouse designed for the data, analytics, and technology innovations of today and tomorrow.”

The company today also is announcing its product for the first time, unveiling what it calls the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse. The idea is to centralize all data, users and workloads in one SQL data warehouse, with the company claiming that its cloud-based system is 90 percent cheaper than on-premise systems.

“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,” Muglia writes.

As part of the deal, John Walecka of Redpoint Ventures — a past investor in Sybase, Documentum and Datameer — has joined the Snowflake board of directors.

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