DataStrike expanded its Snowflake managed services practice to give midmarket customers around-the-clock oversight of platform costs, data pipelines and query performance. The service offering includes architectural support, as production workloads and the AI applications they support, move onto Snowflake’s data cloud, the Pittsburgh-based MSP said in the announcement.
The move targets Snowflake customers that lack dedicated specialists to manage the platform after deployment. DataStrike will help with post-adoption headaches, including warehouse sprawl, query costs and pipeline failures that inflate budgets and slow business operations.
“Snowflake is a powerful platform, but it takes real attention to get the most out of it,” DataStrike President and COO Rob Brown said in the announcement. “Credit consumption can escalate quickly, pipelines fail in ways that aren’t always visible, and without someone watching it around the clock, those problems tend to compound.”
DataStrike built its practice around “owning that responsibility for our clients, whether they are stabilizing a production environment, recovering from credit drift or building out the data foundation they need for AI,” Brown said.
The expanded services cover Snowflake credit consumption and warehouse activity, ingestion and transformation failures, slow or failed queries and architectural assessments focused on cost, reliability and AI readiness.
Human oversight remains essential, Corey Beck, VP of service delivery at DataStrike, told Channel Dive. Snowflake’s native monitoring and cost-governance capabilities have improved, but customers still need personnel who can interpret and respond to alerts.
“Having those tools available and having someone actually watching them, understanding what they mean, and knowing when to act are two different things,” Beck said.
Take a 2 a.m. alert as an example. A failed overnight data load may feed a report needed by 8 a.m. or an application required at the start of the business day.
“Most organizations don’t have anyone awake to receive it, and if they do, it’s often the same person expected to be back in the office at 9 a.m.,” Beck said.“Having someone on the other end who knows which alerts matter to that particular business, who can investigate a failure in real time and who can resolve it or escalate it with the right context, is what keeps that data ready when the business needs it.”
An alert alone is not a solution, Beck emphasized.
“A budget notification in Slack tells you something’s wrong, but it can’t investigate the failure, and it can’t tell you whether it’s the kind of problem that can wait until morning or the kind that needs to be resolved at 2 a.m.,” he said.
An AI alliance
DataStrike engineers provide 24/7 support, monitoring customer environments and resolving incidents — efforts that largely cover the post-deployment lifecycle. To extend its reach upstream into implementation and AI strategy, DataStrike teamed in June with Brainforge, a tiered Snowflake partner. DataStrike is not a Snowflake partner, though it may pursue its own standing with the vendor over time, Beck said.
“Brainforge’s focus is on the big implementation and AI strategy projects, and ours is on the day-to-day operations that keep those environments running once they’re in production,” he said.
The Brainforge partnership is an example of channel co-opetition. Brainforge brings Snowflake implementation and AI-strategy expertise, while DataStrike provides the infrastructure and operational backbone needed once customer environments are live.
The companies are collaborating on a midmarket AI adoption initiative called AI Discovery Sprint. The fixed-scope engagement helps leadership teams identify a priority AI use case and craft a deployment strategy.
Neither company is trying to become the other, Beck said. Brainforge will retain contracts for customers it brings in, while DataStrike keeps the ones it originates.
DataStrike’s Snowflake buildout marks another step in the MSP’s shift beyond its traditional database-administration roots. In the past six months, the company has increased its customer base by roughly 25% and its headcount by about 20%, with hiring focused on Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric and Databricks.
Attrition has remained low during that period, Beck said.
“So much of the value we deliver comes down to the depth of experience of our teams,” he said.
Many organizations engage with DataStrike for initial database support and then expand the scope of the relationship to data infrastructure, Beck explained.
“We used to be known mostly as a database administration company, and now we’re being pulled into conversations about cloud, business intelligence and the operational side of platforms like Snowflake,” he said. “AI has a lot to do with that. Companies are realizing that getting AI to work reliably in production depends on having solid infrastructure underneath it, and that’s opening up work for us that simply didn’t exist a year or two ago.”
