Exclusive Interview: Dhiraj Narang, Director, Snowflake

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Dhiraj Narang, Director, Head of Partnerships, India at Snowflake highlighted channel strategies, plans to expand its partner ecosystem, and a lot more.

What is Snowflake Partner Network and how does it help customers find certified service partners and effectively deploy Snowflake’s products and services in their organizations?

The Snowflake Partner Network unlocks the potential of the Data Cloud with a broad array of tools and partners. Certified partnerships and integrations enable customers to leverage Snowflake’s flexibility, performance, and ease of use to deliver more meaningful data insights. The Snowflake Partner Network consists of an extensive, global network of technology, services, cloud, Snowflake Marketplace, and Powered by Snowflake partners that can help customers implement, manage, and optimize their data operations with Snowflake's single, integrated platform.      

The Snowflake Partner Network provides resources to customers such as training programs & certifications for deploying successful projects based on Snowflake products & services; technical support from qualified professionals to answer customer queries regarding the product; marketing assistance like case studies or webinars; along with access to other helpful tools. By becoming a part of a fast-growing data ecosystem, companies can build successful practices needed to effectively deploy Snowflake, so that they can speed up go-to-market and delight customers.

What is Snowflake’s channel strategy for India?

With a $3.5tn economy, reliable and cheap access to high-quality broadband Internet, and a young population, India has one of the highest recognitions across APJ, for the value of data for businesses and its impact on taking innovative products and services to market quickly.

Snowflake’s Data Cloud ecosystem is growing rapidly to address this opportunity and this growth is fuelled by our partners – they are absolutely critical to everything that we do.  Snowflake’s partners across Services, Technology, Cloud, Snowflake Marketplace, and Powered By Snowflake programs bring a unique set of skills to customers’ data transformation journeys. These range from advising customers on their data strategy, providing the underlying infrastructure to enable their journey to the Data Cloud, tool sets that accelerate time to value, as well as extracting value from their data sets, by way of deep analytics and decision science capabilities.

We leverage the Snowflake Partner Network to equip and enable our partners with the latest and greatest on the Data Cloud story, besides providing incentive structures and advancement opportunities that unlock greater opportunities as they become more accomplished on Snowflake.

Our channel strategy is based on 3 pillars:      

1. Identifying the right partners that share the vision of the Snowflake Data Cloud
2. Taking the Snowflake Data Cloud story, jointly, with our prospects through initiatives like the Data Cloud World Tour
3. Building deep skills within the partner ecosystem through our flagship enablement programs like Snowflake Discover and Snowflake Basecamp, thereby enabling faster time to value for our customers

Our ecosystem consists of a diverse set of partners, ranging from global scale Tech advisory firms, like Deloitte, EY, LTI Mindtree, Accenture, TCS, etc., to cloud service providers, like AWS and Azure, to born-in-the-cloud partners, like Blazeclan and Quantiphi, as well as niche tech ecosystem players, like Fivetran, Tableau, Salesforce, and others. Each of our partners brings a unique perspective and skills that enable our customers to truly evolve into data-driven enterprises.

Snowflake plans to expand its partner ecosystem in India.

Our partner ecosystem has grown in tandem with the Snowflake Data Cloud adoption in India. We continue to invest proactively in the growth of our partner ecosystem, as they play a crucial role in our customers’ journey to the Data Cloud, and helping them realize value from their investments rapidly.

We are focused on partnering with the right organisations where there's good synergy and we look at this opportunity from multiple perspectives     :

1. Their alignment with Snowflake’s Data Cloud vision
2. Focus on enabling data-driven transformation for our customers with capabilities across data engineering, warehousing, and decision sciences as well as building applications that are Powered by Snowflake
3. Ability to work with our client-facing teams to land the Data Cloud messaging to our prospects and customers
4. Propensity and interest in building deep skills on Snowflake

Once we identify the appropriate partners, we bring the strength of our scalable programs like Snowflake Discover to enable the ecosystem more holistically. These online enablement and education programs give us the opportunity to reach a wider group of partners and make it easy for people to consume that knowledge. We see a huge appetite in India, for practitioners to learn about everything data-related.

We see expanding the ecosystem as an ongoing endeavor – take the Snowflake Partner Network Connect Program for example. This is a forum where we get our partners and the Snowflake team together every couple of months to discuss joint programs, initiatives, and enablement.

Define the Partner-first approach adopted by Snowflake.

At Snowflake, our partner program focuses on more than just building pipelines and driving revenue. Snowflake prioritizes developing and maintaining strong partnerships with technology and service providers so that we can provide customers with the best possible experience and outcomes.

Under the partner-first approach, Snowflake views partners as an extension of its own sales and service organizations, working collaboratively with them to develop and deliver innovative solutions to customers. This is reflected in Snowflake's business model, which is designed to be partner-friendly and to provide partners with the resources, training, and support they need to be successful.

For example, our Powered by Snowflake program provides partners and customers developing applications on Snowflake with the tools and resources they need to build and operate applications in the Data Cloud. In addition, partners can monetize the apps they built on Snowflake, on Snowflake Marketplace.

Through this approach, Snowflake aims to build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with its partners, based on trust, collaboration, and shared success. By working closely with its partners and prioritizing their needs and interests, Snowflake aims to provide customers with the best possible experience and outcomes and to continue to drive growth and innovation in the data management and analytics space.

Tell us about the different skills and capabilities of Snowflake’s partners

Snowflake's partners bring a wide range of skills and capabilities to the table, with a focus on helping customers to design, build, and optimize their data operations using Snowflake's platform and services. Whether customers are looking for data management and analytics expertise, cloud computing and infrastructure expertise, application development and integration expertise, or industry-specific expertise, Snowflake's partners can help them to achieve their goals and drive business value.

Cloud partners, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, enable our multi- and cross-cloud strategies, providing a unified experience regardless of the location of data users and their workloads. Businesses can seamlessly and securely share data with their partners, regardless of which clouds they are using.

Technology Partners enable Snowflake's Data Cloud users to connect to dozens of other solutions easily, removing the cost, risk, and headache of connecting disparate legacy systems. These partners allow Snowflake customers to get the most out of Snowflake and easily derive more meaningful data insights.

Tying everything together in a neat package are Service Partners who provide customized, industry-focused solutions to customers. These help customers get the most out of Snowflake's products and services and optimize their data operations for better business outcomes.

What growth do you foresee in APAC over the next few years and where does India stand in terms of contributing towards the growth of this region?

Snowflake’s Data Cloud ecosystem is growing rapidly across the APAC / APJ regions and this progress is largely attributed to the invaluable contributions made by our partners. Their role is absolutely crucial to our operations. India stands out in terms of acknowledging the significance of data and displaying a high demand for data-driven expertise. Many of our partners have significant offshore capabilities in India and they are actively investing in enhancing their skills and acquiring knowledge related to the Snowflake Data Cloud and local markets. All this to say, we see major opportunities and we’re really excited about it in India.

How is Snowflake making transitions to support its partners to adapt to a multi-cloud environment and help them deliver a unified and consistent cloud experience for the customers?

Snowflake has always held multi-cloud as one of its foundational beliefs because we want to give users flexibility in choosing the platform that best suits their needs. Allowing different business units to use a public cloud provider with features and services tailored for them ultimately leads to enhanced productivity.

Furthermore, businesses can leverage the best cloud provider by region based on presence and capacity requirements for local teams. A multi-cloud approach also ensures uptime and SLA adherence by protecting against single outage occurrences within one vendor's offering.

As a result, many partners already understand how beneficial this is since it helps deliver customers a unified and consistent experience across clouds while also supporting every workload type needing access to data from Snowflake.