How Snowflake is making inroads in the Indian enterprise market
AI data cloud company Snowflake sees strong growth potential in the Indian enterprise market and is expanding into newer verticals each year. Here’s how.
Snowflake, the artificial intelligence (AI) data cloud company founded in 2012, has made significant inroads in the Indian enterprise market, with its products and solutions gaining wider acceptance across various segments, driven by its core philosophy of delivering time to value.
The US-headquartered company, in a span of five years, gained its first set of customers in India’s digital, cloud-native companies. Since then, there has been no looking back for Snowflake.
Fundamentally a technology company that enables data management for enterprises, Snowflake puts unstructured information in a structured format, as well as provides AI and machine learning (ML) solutions. Any form of AI is impossible to implement unless one has clean data at hand.
In a conversation with EnterpriseStory, Vijayant Rai, Managing Director, India – Snowflake, said, “The biggest challenge Indian enterprises face is fragmented information, and we solved it by getting them all into one place, which is the unification of data. Once this was done, they had better analytics and insights.”
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For Snowflake, there was a natural resonance with cloud-native companies. As Rai puts it, “It was second nature for them to adopt the latest technologies.”
Meanwhile, Snowflake faced a different challenge with enterprises, which were not fully into the cloud, with their data scattered across multiple platforms. The AI data cloud company saw that these companies were keen on bringing their data into a single place to extract the most benefits out of it.
According to Rai, Snowflake’s technology platform can bring all this data into one place for it to be used for various use cases—from risk management strategies for a financial services company to visibility on the supply chain network by a consumer goods firm.
Besides, through data unification, enterprises can now engage with others in the ecosystem to provide value-added services. For example, an airline company can tie up with a hospitality firm to offer a range of options for customers—whether it’s buying plane tickets or booking hotel rooms.
“We just took out the friction, and the speed increased in terms of how enterprises could utilise third-party data sets. These are the unlocks we have started to see in the India market,” Rai says.
Role of AI
Once the data unification is done, Snowflake’s AI platforms come into play. The AI data cloud company ensures that all the guardrails are in place so this data does not move out of the cloud and is protected at all times. “We allow them to get the best of AI, but in a secure fashion,” remarks Rai.
On the pace of adoption of AI among Indian enterprises, the Snowflake India MD believes that traditional companies are very serious about how to unlock the value of this technology.
According to him, the experimentation phase is over, and Indian enterprises now have clear, designated AI projects that they believe will be valuable to them. “Organisations like us are working with them to scale it up,” he adds.
Further, Snowflake is tapping into the mid-market enterprise segment, as these companies typically would not have the necessary engineering resources to make sense of their data and apply AI. Snowflake helps with ready-made solutions so these companies can focus on their business.
Today, the key focus verticals for Snowflake in India are: financial services, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and retail. The digital native companies cutting across segments form the largest chunk for Snowflake. It also sees major opportunities in the public sector in the coming years.
All this has helped Snowflake double its go-to-market team over the last year. Rai says India remains the major destination for Snowflake and is one of the fastest-growing regions in the Asia-Pacific-Japan region. The AI Data cloud company is confident that its current growth momentum will continue.
As part of its future plans, Snowflake aims to create a data ecosystem for various industry verticals that would function as a common source point for companies. Also, it wants to strengthen its partner ecosystem, including partnering with entities and independent software vendors, who will help it go deeper into the Indian enterprises and build innovative solutions on its platform.
“Our message to the market is clear: Your data is going to be secure and safe with us while you get the latest innovations to stay ahead in the business,” Rai concludes.
Edited by Suman Singh