Firebolt says it can do it better while the cloud giants talk up services tweaks Lindsay Clark Tue 15 Dec 2020 // 09:30 UTC Share Copy Analysis Tech stock sailed through an era-defining moment last week as recently IPO'd cloud data warehouser Snowflake surpassed IBM in market capitalisation. Investors' collective imagination is decidedly unflattering for Big Blue. Leaving aside its undeniable role in the development of modern computing, it has around 350,000 employees (although declining) to Snowflake's 2,000. The staggering $120bn Snowflake valuation offered pause for thought about this once-niche hole in the enterprise software market and the money flooding in has encouraged others to make a grab for it, claiming there is headroom for technical improvement.