VentureBeat presents: AI Unleashed - An exclusive executive event for enterprise data leaders. Network and learn with industry peers. Learn MoreToday, data cloud major Snowflake announced the intent to acquire Ponder Data, a startup working to simplify access to Python data science libraries. Snowflake did provide the terms of the deal. But the company said the move will expand Python capabilities in its data platform, giving enterprise users and developers an easier way to work.The move marks another step from the company to improve support for Python, which is quickly becoming the preferred language for developing websites and software, task automation, data analysis, and data visualization. According to a recent from Stack Overflow, the popularity of Python has more than doubled between 2013 and 2023.Python data science libraries like Pandas are quite powerful — used by millions to prepare, transform, and analyze data in machine learning workflows. AI UnleashedAn exclusive invite-only evening of insights and networking, designed for senior enterprise executives overseeing data stacks and strategies. Despite this level of adoption, they often become unusable on large datasets, creating a scalability challenge. This leads to extensive engineering cycles to rewrite the Python workloads into big data frameworks.To solve this problem, Doris Lee, Devin Petersohn and Aditya Parameswaran, who all worked together in UC Berkeley’s RISE Lab, founded Ponder in mid 2021. It allows data teams to run their Python data workflows (Pandas, NumPy) directly in their data warehouse, and enables teams to iterate on these workflows quickly, from prototype to deployment, all running securely within the selected data platform.This directly addresses the scalability challenge, allowing users to operate on data at any scale — without changing a single line of code — speeding up development cycles. Ponder maintains open-source tools Modin and Lux. The former is a “drop-in replacement” for Pandas, while the latter is a visualization tool that automatically identifies visual insights on large and complex datasets.To date, Ponder has supported multiple data platforms, including Snowflake, Google BigQuery and DuckDB. With this deal, the product is expected to become a part of the Snowflake data cloud, allowing users to run their Python data science libraries in the platform easily for fast-tracked development across machine learning, applications, pipelines and more. “When Snowflake approached us to potentially acquire Ponder, we saw an opportunity to bring these libraries directly to the data and build on top of Snowflake’s strong performance, flexibility, security, and scalability and the success of its Snowpark offering to further create the best possible Python data science experience in the Data Cloud,” the founders of Ponder wrote in a joint statement.However, it remains unclear if the platform will continue to support other platforms moving ahead. Questions sent to Snowflake remained unanswered at the time of writing.“We’re beyond excited to be joining forces not just with the founders of Ponder and their incredible team, but also with the entire Modin community. Modin boasts hundreds of thousands of users and a dedicated community of over a hundred contributors. This community has played a pivotal role in shaping Modin’s current success and will remain instrumental in its future development. We are steadfast in our commitment to support and nurture both the open-source project and its vibrant community,” Jeff Hollan, director of product for the Snowflake developer platform, and senior product manager Sri Chintala, wrote in a separate blog post.The acquisition of Ponder marks another step from Snowflake to improve the developer experience on its platform. Last year, the company acquired San Francisco-based Streamlit, a framework designed to help with the development of interactive applications in Python, and integrated it into the data cloud. It also offers features like Python worksheets that let teams use Snowpark Python in Snowsight to perform data manipulations and transformations.Overall, this is Snowflake’s fifth acquisition of the year after Myst AI, Mobilize.Net’s SnowConvert, LeapYear Technologies and Neeva.VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.Join us for key insights and networking with leaders in the Data and AI spaces at VB's exclusive after hours event this November! © 2023 VentureBeat. All rights reserved.