Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key technologies and key techniques; the ‘cloud foundation track’, being aimed more as a beginner’s course, and the ‘modern data analytics track’, which is focused more at advanced users and strays into topics such as agile data warehousing and Python.

Prospective students are encouraged to take all three courses; completing one track earns a Cloud Analytics Academy certification, while completing all three means they achieve Academy Master certification.

“Organisations of all sizes now face enormous pressure to deliver analytics faster and at a lower cost than ever before, and many are looking to the cloud to address these challenges,” said Mark Budzinski, CEO of WhereScape. “We’re excited to partner with Snowflake to help data professionals gain the knowledge needed to maximise the benefits cloud data warehousing offers.

“We also want to help data professionals understand how automation can help IT be more agile in their development and operational efforts to deliver value to the business faster,” added Budzinski.

The press materials cite a Gartner report which puts growth of the worldwide software as a service (SaaS) market at more than 63% by 2020. According to a study from BARC Research and Eckerson Group, four in five firms said they were planning to increase the use of cloud for BI and data management in the coming year.

You can find out more about the Cloud Analytics Academy here.