WApps 🤔

WApps or Warehouse-native Apps: The future of SaaS?

Snowflake (best known as a data warehouse vendor, even though warehousing is one of the many solutions offered by the Cloud Data Platform) is certainly responsible for the rapid adoption of the warehouse-native architecture by data and martech (marketing technology) vendors.

And the influx of Warehouse-native Apps or WApps is leading to the rise of the Composable Data Platform (at this point, the term "customer" is just redundant).

Okay, it's time to put confusing data puns aside and get into today’s track…

WApps (Warehouse-native Apps)

Back in June of 2021, when not many companies were talking about "warehouse-native" as this new paradigm in the way B2B software is built, I'd written a primer on warehouse-native apps.

Fast forward to today, the warehouse-native architecture is all the rage in the data industry and is also being adopted by forward-looking martech vendors.

Therefore, now is the perfect time to revisit the guide and also soak in all the great conversations taking place about this topic.

Okay, so what exactly is a warehouse-native app?

A warehouse-native app is any SaaS tool that can run on top of a customer’s cloud data warehouse, without the need to ingest and store any data.

Warehouse-native apps run on top of a customer’s cloud data warehouse

Warehouse-native Apps Explained

The Chorus

Luke Ambrosetti has established himself as one of the foremost experts on WApps. He spent a considerable amount of time helping companies adopt a warehouse-native email marketing tool long before this thing became cool.

He's now at Snowflake and has been doing a really good job of educating people about the different ways SaaS vendors can build on top of the cloud data platform. Whether you're interested in integrating your product with Snowflake or building a fully connected SaaS application, ​Luke has you covered in his latest post​.

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If you've been following the chatter on LinkedIn, you might already know that the terms "warehouse-native" and "composable" are being used interchangeably by many since WApps essentially enable organizations to assemble a composable data platform.

A friend and collaborator, Juan Mendoza recently published a piece on composability in software which I really enjoyed (he even threw in a music analogy that made my heart sing). I'd encourage you to check out the full post but if you're looking for a jumping point before digging deeper, I recommend starting with ​Luke's comment on Juan's post​.

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Lastly, whether you're looking to build a warehouse-native app from scratch or support the architecture for your existing SaaS product, you definitely want to hear it from Abhishek Rai of NetSpring (a WApp reimagining product analytics) who was recently interviewed by the person whose name I've already mentioned thrice.

Get answers to fundamental questions about building a Warehouse-native App in this 12-minute video​.

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We've taken a bunch of content on this very hot topic and created a collection called Warehouse-native Beats. 🥁 🥁

Warehouse-native Beats [Series]