GCCs in India driving decision-making for global firms, no longer just back offices: Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy

Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India are driving decision-making for global firms and are no longer just back offices, said AI data cloud company Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. He also added that Snowflake will staff a very large team in India that will work with GCCs.

“Sometimes it’s like abbreviations don’t convey the spirit of what is going on. What is really going on is that many companies are effectively setting up very large technology centres (GCCs) in India. This is no longer back-office work. This is no longer coding work,” Ramaswamy told Moneycontrol in a freewheeling interview.

Read the full interview here.

A GCC is a dedicated offshore unit established by a company in a foreign country to in-source IT and related business functions.

Interestingly, the statement by Ramaswamy is backed by data that reveals Indians constitute approximately 10-13 percent of leadership roles in GCCs. Currently, about 100 Indian Chief Investment Officers/Senior Vice Presidents are employed in GCCs with salaries falling in the million-dollar club, Moneycontrol reported in July citing ANSR Research and TeamLease Digital.

In all probability, this number could be around 150 by now.

The comments assume significance as GCCs have been the buzzword with the sector set for exponential growth in the coming years. This can also be understood from the fact that India had over 1,700 GCCs and an export revenue of $65 billion in FY24, growing at over 40 percent from the previous year.

Moreover, India's Economic Survey 2024 showed that GCCs will contribute roughly 3.5 percent to India’s GDP by 2030, generating an estimated revenue of $121 billion by then.

In the interview with Moneycontrol during his recent India visit, the CEO of NYSE-listed Snowflake spoke about why he is operating with urgency, how AI will disrupt SaaS, why Perplexity worked, and his ties with IIT Madras.

Ramaswamy, who has worked at Google for over 15 years in various capacities, explained the importance of having the right leadership in place in GCCs, as finding the right leader is the key to success.

The former co-founder of AI-powered search engine Neeva told us that Snowflake’s Pune Centre of Excellence (CoE) has plans to house a product team. “The Pune centre will house a variety of functions, including IT, finance, and a center of excellence for solution architects, who are crucial in making Snowflake’s solutions work for clients,” the IIT-Madras alumnus added.

Ramaswamy said many of his senior executives and solutions architects based out of New York are traveling to India as they realise that their customer is in India, and the decision maker is in India. He added that GCCs are no longer just about coding, they are integral to the operations of major sectors, such as banking and financial services, where software has become the core of business operations.

“These are ambitious, qualified, amazing folks that are responsible for entire subsystems, the software, and increasingly the processes that drive business. It used to be that software was like a little thing that you used on the side, but software now for a bank or a financial institution is its business,” Ramaswamy added.

Going forward, Snowflake is headed into a very different role and will “absolutely” be leading in it.

Also read: GCC spree pushes up demand for data centres, enters list of top sectors