Data cloud company Snowflake has appointed Vijayant Rai, a former executive at Microsoft, as its new managing director for India. In his role, Rai will be instrumental in steering business growth and formulating the go-to-market strategy for Snowflake in the country.
Rai takes over from Vimal Venkatram, who has transitioned to a regional role for Snowflake based in Singapore. With over 27 years of senior sales experience, Rai is set to lead Snowflake’s business expansion across India, focusing on strategy, sales execution, strategic partnership engagements, and fostering data cloud adoption in various industries.
Having previously served as the executive director at Microsoft India, where he led the BFSI industry segment, Rai brings a wealth of experience to Snowflake. His leadership roles at Salesforce, SAP, and CA Technologies underscore his expertise in the technology sector.
“As MD, my primary focus will be to help our customers fully mobilise their data into successful business outcomes. Snowflake recently announced a slew of new features, including Snowflake Cortex currently in private preview, that facilitates businesses with swift development of AI applications, further bolstering their commitment to driving innovation in the Indian market,” said Rai.
Sanjay Deshmukh, senior vice president of ASEAN and India at Snowflake, expressed confidence in Rai’s ability to spearhead the company’s expansion in the local market and drive strong growth across portfolios. Deshmukh highlighted the significant adoption potential across all industries in India.
Established in July 2012 and publicly launched in October 2014, Snowflake provides cloud-based data storage and analytics services. The platform acts as the engine for the data cloud, offering solutions for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, application development, and data sharing.
The demand for cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in India’s SME sector has been on the rise. Approximately 35% of Indian SMBs are expected to migrate a significant portion of their core workloads to the cloud by 2024, according to IDC. With over 63 million SMEs in India and the cloud computing market projected to reach $17.8 billion by 2027, major players like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure are actively targeting this market.
