NYSE-listed Snowflake appoints new India MD, calls country a ‘strategic market’

Vijayant Rai, India MD, Snowflake

Data cloud company Snowflake on January 10 announced that it has appointed former Microsoft India executive director, Vijayant Rai, as the new managing director to drive business growth and go-to-market strategy for the software company in India. He will be succeeding Vimal Venkatram, who has moved to Singapore in a regional role.

Rai will be responsible spearheading Snowflake's India expansion strategy, sales and execution. He will also be looking after fostering strategic partnership engagements to drive adoption of Snowflake's Data Cloud across various industries, such as retail and CPG, manufacturing, public sector, startups, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and BFSI.

As of now, in India, Snowflake is closely working with both the start-up ecosystem with customers including Swiggy, Kissht, BYJU’s Urban Company to name a few and legacy businesses like Marico.

Rai comes with over 27 years of experience with global software majors including Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP. He has held several senior sales positions focussed on driving new business and revenue growth, expanding business in India, and attracting and retaining talent.

In his previous, role he was the executive director and country leader for Microsoft India’s banking and financial services vertical.

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

Sanjay Deshmukh, Senior Vice President of ASEAN and India, told Moneycontrol, “We are at this inflection point to scale our business in India…So, super excited for Vijayant to come on board as our new India MD. The expertise he has in the India market working with companies like Microsoft, SAP Salesforce, which has given him an understanding of building businesses across different sectors. I think that is very relevant for us.”

“For Snowflake, India has been a very, very strategic market. So, we see this as an investment that we are making, to support the growth of our business here,” he added.

“I am thrilled to be a part of the snowflake team. I share the vision of the organization in terms of guiding or empowering data driven innovation, and collaboration, and of course, the culturalism needs as well as the culture of excellence. But the key thing for me is, India today as a market is probably the fastest, and the most exciting growth market in the globe,” Rai told Moneycontrol.

Rai believes Snowflake is at the right place and at the right time, as data is just about to take off.

“We are still competing against data which is on premise, and how you could get people to start collaborating more on data, how to monetize data, etc. Here Snowflake is in that unique position to take advantage and help lead the narrative for the data-driven economy in the country,” he added.

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 from across cloud servers of partnering hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; and even monetise it.

An NYSE-listed company, its revenue grew 32 percent year-on-year (YoY) to $734.2 million in Q3FY24 (quarter ended October 31, 2023). The company is currently expecting on cloud consumption recovery in 2024 and is also riding on the AI hype cycle with a slew of generative AI offerings planned.

India a strategic market

According Deskhmukh, India is a key market broadly for three reasons; and one of them is the domestic opportunity the company sees in India as a “leading and growing economy”.

“It is a growing economy and that offers a massive opportunity for companies like us to build businesses here to serve the local customers,” he said.

The second major opportunity, Deskhmukh highlighted, is the 1,500 plus global capability centres (GCCs) in India set up by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. Most of these companies are Snowflake’s customers in the US.

“These customers have employees here in India, who are participating in either the strategy or influencing the technical platform or are in the tech leadership role, depending upon the organization and what kind of presence they have. There are different kinds of resources who are based in India, and they are influencing the usage of Snowflake platform for these respective organizations, and we are looking at supporting them,” he said.

Interestingly, a few days back, SAP Labs India MD Sindhu Gangadharan noted a similar trend while speaking at the Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet. She said India no more just a talent hub but is also driving demand for top companies. In fact, she added, that these GCCs are creating more than 5,000 global leadership roles from the country.

The third reason, he believes is the thriving startup ecosystem in the country which grew significantly over the last 5-7 years. Apart from some legacy companies, Snowflake has been catering to many startups across sectors in India and majorly in two categories—consumer tech and digital services.