Snowflake Summit 2026: zero-copy integrations and an MCP gateway for agents

Data platforms and integration platforms have long been neighbours: the iPaaS moves data, and the data platform stores and analyses it. At Snowflake Summit, which opened on 2 June, Snowflake moved further into integration territory on two fronts. It wants to reach data in other systems without copying it, and it wants to control how AI agents reach business applications.

What Snowflake announced

On 2 June, Snowflake presented what it calls an open framework for interoperable data and AI:

• Zero-copy integrations with SAP, Salesforce and Workday, and new partnerships with AVEVA and IBM, so that data can be used across Snowflake and these systems without being duplicated.
• Apache Iceberg v3 support, generally available, and managed storage for Iceberg tables, so other engines can read and write the same data.
• Horizon Catalog, built on Apache Polaris, for common governance of data wherever it is stored.

A few days before the conference, on 27 May, Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Natoma, a platform for Model Context Protocol. Natoma offers a verified library of MCP servers and central policies for how agents reach applications, databases, APIs and tools. According to Snowflake, it will be connected to Cortex Agents, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Code.

Christian Kleinerman, who leads product at Snowflake, put the argument simply: moving and duplicating data to make it usable cannot keep up with the pace of AI.

Why it matters

Zero-copy integration is a direct challenge to a large part of traditional integration work. Many iPaaS flows exist only to copy data from SAP or Salesforce into a data warehouse. If the data platform can read the same data in place, some of those flows are no longer needed.

The Natoma deal points in the other direction: from data to action. Snowflake does not only want agents to read data. It wants them to act in other systems, and it wants to be the place where that access is controlled. That is exactly the role the iPaaS vendors are claiming with their own MCP gateways.

How it compares

Zero-copy is not free. It depends on the source systems offering the right interfaces, and the cost of running queries against live data can be higher than a nightly load. For many companies, the result will be a mix, where some data is shared in place and some is still moved.

For MCP governance, the risk is the same as with other platforms: several gateways, each seeing only part of the agent traffic.

What to ask

1. Which flows only copy data? Go through integrations that move data into Snowflake, and check whether zero-copy could replace them for the systems that support it.
2. What does it cost? Compare the cost of queries on live, shared data with the cost of copying it.
3. Which MCP gateway is the main one? If Snowflake agents need access to business systems, decide whether that access goes through Snowflake, your iPaaS, or both.