New Delhi, April 15 -- Snowflake India, established just five years back, is a rapidly expanding hub for the US-headquartered global data cloud company. The company is actively engaging with sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, and professional services, while also making significant inroads into the public sector. Its dedicated Center of Excellence in Pune serves as a critical global delivery unit and the company plans invest further here.
TechCircle interviewed Vijayant Rai, Snowflake's India Managing Director, who completed a year in this role in January, to understand about what lies ahead for this company, especially in regional context. Edited excerpts:
You completed a year as the Snowflake India head. What have been the most transformative initiatives taken by you in this period?
The journey so far has been incredibly exciting. One thing is clear that data is the foundation. Given Snowflake's role in this space, we've naturally found ourselves at the heart of many large-scale transformation projects with our customers.
When I took over last year, my focus was on scaling up our enterprise business. We already had a strong foothold in the digital-native sector, which was the first cohort we targeted when Snowflake entered India about five years ago. That initial strategy served us well. The next step was expanding our presence across the broader enterprise ecosystem.
To do that, we evaluated how best to support enterprises, what kind of coverage we needed, and how we could become a true partner to their business. We've expanded significantly across our three offices in India, and today we're actively working with customers in financial services, manufacturing, retail, professional services, and more.
What lies ahead for Snowflake India in 2025?
This year, we've begun focusing on the public sector. Adoption of the public cloud in this space has been relatively slow, but we see it as a critical area for our future strategy. We're investing in building a dedicated team to work with public sector organisations.
What we did for the enterprise business last year is a good example. We assessed our go-to-market strategy, expanded our partner ecosystem, and ensured we had the right coverage. We've significantly grown our partner network, working closely with major advisory firms, system integrators, and global innovation service (GIS) providers.
India is a vast and diverse market, and we don't want to miss the opportunities on the commercial side of the business either. That's why we have a distinct go-to-market (GTM) strategy for commercial customers, separate from our enterprise efforts. Our commercial team focuses on the small to medium businesses (SMBs) and mid-market segment - an important and rapidly growing space for Snowflake. Our platform's ease of adoption, which doesn't require large engineering teams or complex infrastructure, makes it especially attractive to this segment. In fact, we've more than doubled our coverage team to meet this demand.
How many employees do you have in India and how do you plan to grow further?
We're now a team of nearly 700 people in India, and we're continuing to grow, especially across our GTM functions. Our GTM teams are based in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, and these are sizable teams that engage directly with customers. In addition to customer-facing roles, we also have technical teams, which is our solution engineering group that works closely with clients to understand their needs and design tailored solutions. We also have a strong professional services team composed of deep experts in data migration and implementation.
Our Pune office is a key Center of Excellence (CoE) for us outside the US Several critical global functions operate from this hub. One of the flagship programs run out of Pune is called "Snow on Snow", which is a showcase of how Snowflake, as a $3B+ organisation with over 11,000 customers, uses its own platform to manage internal functions like finance, HR, and sales. We consider ourselves "customer zero," and this program demonstrates the real-world power of our platform.
The Pune CoE is still relatively new, only four years old, but we see immense strategic value in it and will continue to invest in its growth.
India has also been designated a fast-track market for Snowflake globally. We are on course to become one of the fastest-growing markets for the company, driven by two key factors: the country being highly data intensive and its significant headroom for growth. India's digital ecosystem is massive, and our platform is equipped to cater to this continued expansion.
Snowflake set up its presence in India just five years ago. Looking back, do you feel the timing was right, or do you think an earlier entry might have brought additional advantages?
Cloud adoption at scale is still a work in progress in India. A significant portion of the market-especially legacy enterprises-remains on-prem. For many of these organisations, serious cloud adoption only began in the past five years, with the Covid-19 pandemic acting as a major catalyst. In that context, I'd say our entry into the Indian market came at the right time. The broader ecosystem itself is scaling rapidly. Analyst reports project a 24-25% CAGR for cloud adoption in India between 2023 and 2028, which validates our timing and strategy.
As a company that operates entirely on the public cloud, Snowflake was well-positioned to tap into this transformation.
Further, the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 created a lot of excitement, and while the initial buzz was high, the realisation quickly followed that Artificial Intelligence's (AI) true potential can only be utilised when your data is in order. You can't operate with siloed data and expect meaningful AI outcomes. Organisations are rethinking and pivoting their data strategies, moving towards integrated data management on the cloud to accommodate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
These two shifts, cloud adoption and the AI inflection point, have been critical growth drivers for us. Snowflake sits at the intersection of both trends. Our platform helps customers manage their data end-to-end, whether through data warehousing or data lakes, and provides a strong foundation for AI and Machine Learning (ML) workloads.
We bring large language models (LLMs) directly to your data, ensuring it stays within the platform. Today, we offer 19 LLM options, and we handle all updates and integrations as part of our managed service.
What are your thoughts on few companies deciding to go back to on-prem infrastructure from cloud? How is Snowflake equipped to handle such challenge?
The push to move back on-prem typically stems from operational challenges. But realistically, returning to on-prem isn't a viable option for most organisations, unless you're among the few large enterprises that can afford to scale their own infrastructure, the economics and agility simply don't add up. Cloud offers unmatched scalability and the ability to apply updates quickly, something that's much harder to manage in an on-prem environment.
That said, organisations sometimes consider moving away from the cloud when they face governance or operational inefficiencies-especially around cost management and resource utilisation. That's why it's critical to have strong cloud management practices in place. At Snowflake, we've embedded FinOps capabilities directly into the platform. This allows customers to monitor usage, set thresholds and alerts, and optimise spend across use cases, ensuring transparency and control.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.