We don't do 24-month projects, we can deliver in a few weeks: Snowflake India MD

Vimal Venkatram, MD, Snowflake India

Until 2020, Urban Company was stuck with its previous data warehouse, unable to smoothly and cost-effectively scale their computing resources to meet daily demand. When they bought additional capacity to cover peak demand, they ended up paying for what was not being used as well.

The home services startup’s IT team then zeroed down on Snowflake.

The decision was made in February 2020. Within a month, the migration from the previous data warehouse was complete and the new platform was ready to go live from late March. Urban Company staff were now able to resolve queries in less than two minutes. It was taking more than 20 minutes earlier.

Snowflake, which was founded in 2012 in San Mateo, California, is a multi-cloud managed Software-as-a-services (SaaS) company. The company enables customers with tools and platforms to collect and analyse their data and even monetise it.

An NYSE-listed company, its revenue grew 83 percent year-on-year (YoY) to $497 million in Q2FY23 (quarter ended July 31, 2022), as its losses continued to shrink. It currently has over 6,000 customers globally.

While it was already present in India and the Southeast Asia region, Vimal Venkatram became its first hired employee in the region about three and a half years ago.

Venkatram was appointed as managing director of India business in February this year. Its clientele in India include BYJU’s, Swiggy, Marico, Khatabook, Urban Company and Cars 24, to name a few.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Venkatram takes us through the company’s business strategy, next growth frontiers and more.

Excerpts:

Q: Where does Snowflake’s business model differentiate from other hyperscaler cloud companies? Snowflake also has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft Azure…

A: We don't have our own infrastructure. We rely on partners like AWS or Microsoft Azure to provide us the elasticity, the computing, the storage, the networking, and everything as an underlying infrastructure.

We host ourselves above that. We have our own intellectual property. We call ourselves multi-cloud. So, we partner with them and are very large customers for Amazon, Microsoft and Google as well.

Sometimes, we also compete as they may also have certain solutions. But there have been amazing collaborative efforts. For example, at our Data Cloud World tour, our flagship event, Amazon was a black diamond sponsor. So AWS had a booth there. And therein lies the spirit of partnership.

Q: India is currently at an interesting inflection point in terms of regulations. The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill is being reworked, there is a push for data localisation and the government has also announced special infra status and eligibility for data centres. How does that impact businesses like Snowflake in India?

A: When we say data localisation, people mean that the data should remain in India. So we are already data-localised. Snowflake is present in AWS in Mumbai, and Microsoft Azure in Pune. We are multi-cloud in India, and our data will always be in Indian shores, unless customers themselves decide to move data out of India.

We have many customers who insist on data localisation. Financial services companies, for example, want data to be here because of regulations, and we allow that. We also have data centres in other regions like Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Australia. But that's an option for customers. If they want to host data, let's say in Korea, they can. But if they have a need for data to be in India, data localisation is absolute.

Q: Have you seen any specific uptick in business since the data centre announcement was made during the budget? How are things shaping up? Microsoft has announced certain investments for building data centres. Even Google Cloud has.

A: So, that's their business. They want to build as much public cloud capacity as they possibly can. We will take advantage of those investments. But we don't invest in data centres ourselves. If there's a Microsoft investment, or Amazon investment in a particular region, if it makes business sense, we will invest in Snowflake services in those regions, once they have set it up themselves.

Our primary business is to offer the best-managed services for data for our customers, which we call data cloud.

Q: Which are the biggest sectors from where clients come?

A: If I look at global data, some of the largest verticals are financial services, telecom, retail, consumer products, government and digital natives. When I say digital natives, these are customers who are born in the cloud. They don't know what a data center is.

If you go and meet a Swiggy or a BYJU’s, they wouldn't know what a data centre is. All they care about is writing applications which are awesome, innovative and cool. And just focusing on business outcomes. Everything else, like managing infrastructure, managing your servers or computer storage is all taken care of. Because it's very easy and that's really been the cornerstone of Snowflake as well. We make it really easy for customers to consume data at scale.

Q: Are you working on public sector projects as well here? 

A: We will soon start our public sector foray. We don't have one yet. So that's a very important part of our GTM (go-to-market strategy) for India. We will have our first public sector project next month in India and that's going to be a very important part of our GTM.

Q: How big a market is India for Snowflake?

A: I wouldn't give exact numbers. But India is a very important market from a growth standpoint. Some of the most innovative use cases on adoption of Snowflake have come from India. I've seen that personally as well.

We do see India at the forefront of data analytics and cloud adoption. And this is done at scale. We've seen customers being very, very innovative with what they're doing with Snowflake, how they're deploying and on what use cases it can be used for.

To give an example of Swiggy, they were using Snowflake to figure out delivery riders in low demand areas, and move them to high demand areas in near-real time. And that's all being run on our platform.

Q: As per research reports, the top three hyperscalers -- AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure -- have seen a slowdown in revenue in the first half of 2022. On the contrary, globally, Snowflake continues to report strong numbers and equally strong targets for the upcoming quarters. How would you assess this scenario? What works for Snowflake?

A: The word we are to use in the world of data is ‘time to value’. How quickly can I deliver value for our customers? We don't do 24-month projects, we just deliver outcomes very quickly, in a few weeks; at times, a few short months for very large, complex projects. Time-to-value is super important.

The second is the flexibility of Snowflake. We are multi-cloud globally, and we are not tied to one hyperscaler. So if customers have a multi-cloud strategy, they can use Snowflake as a common data platform across, let's say, an Amazon or Microsoft. And that's very powerful. Because you're not just looking at putting data in one basket, you can now have a true multi-cloud strategy.

And the third thing is that we are now calling ourselves ‘data cloud’. What is data cloud? Data cloud is where customers can use one platform for all of their needs, whether you're using Snowflake for data warehousing, or as a data lake. But truly our next frontier is data sharing. How do customers now share data between each other in a data cloud? How to potentially monetise your data?  Monetisation is a key theme for many, many customers.

Q: Where do you see the next phase of growth for Snowflake coming from?

A: We have a data marketplace as well, with more than 250 data providers and over 1,500 data sets which are listed across different verticals, like financial data, weather data, retail data, demographics, and SEC data. So customers can now consume that data at scale, even publish their own data sets on our marketplace.

We recently announced the acquisition of a company called Streamlit. We're now helping customers to write modern data-intensive applications, which can directly be monetised on our marketplace. This is really the next phase of massive growth for us. Our CEO said in an earnings call that we're disrupting the entire applications market. So that's really where Snowflake’s vision is and that's one of the reasons which is driving our incredible growth.