Longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia, who oversaw five years of strong growth and enormous fundraising at data warehousing startup Snowflake Computing, is out as CEO, the company announced Wednesday.
Muglia will be replaced by Frank Slootman, who ran ServiceNow as chairman and CEO from 2011 to 2017. Snowflake emphasized Slootman’s experience taking ServiceNow and his previous company, Data Domain, through the IPO process, which is likely the next step for Snowflake after raising nearly $1 billion in capital from investors.
Muglia told The Wall Street Journal that he is assisting with the leadership transition, and Snowflake’s board of directors said in a statement that “Bob is a high integrity leader and leaves us with an excellent reputation. We look forward to working with Bob through this transition and wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”
Snowflake’s data warehouse, a specialized type of database built for analytical queries, has grown strongly over the last several years as one of the better cloud-native data warehouses on the market. It runs on both Amazon Web Services and Azure, and allows companies to quickly process analytical queries on large amounts of data in hopes of unlocking new insights into their customers or products.
Muglia ran Microsoft’s server and tools division for several years as part of a 23-year career at Microsoft. He splits his time between the Bay Area and Seattle, although that might change now that he’s no longer running one of the more prominent enterprise computing startups in the industry.
[Editor’s note: This post was updated with a statement from Snowflake’s board of directors.]
