Snowflake building a robust channel ecosystem with the right policies

Dhiraj Narang

Over the past five years of its journey in India, Snowflake has built a diverse customer base across industries, such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, and consumer packaged goods (CPG)

Channels and partnerships play a significant role in helping drive business growth by creating new routes to market, helping businesses scale, and meeting industry-specific needs. As organizations, specifically in the technology space, look to build their partnership ecosystems, channel-friendly policies are critical to their success.
As enterprises accelerate their adoption of AI, they will work closely with technology partners like Snowflake to implement solutions. A robust set of policies and frameworks will enable channel partners to unlock this immense potential by delivering tailored solutions across industries like financial services, retail & CPG, manufacturing, and logistics. Channel-friendly approaches are essential for facilitating smooth collaboration across customers, OEMs, and partners, especially in a market as large and diverse as India, where deep domain expertise, stakeholder relationships, and a strong geographical presence are crucial. “For Snowflake, these policies are integral to building a robust ecosystem that maximizes customer value,” says Dhiraj Narang, Director, Head of Partnerships- India, Snowflake. “Through clear engagement strategies, incentives, training, and support, these policies help partners contribute meaningfully to enterprises' business transformation initiatives and achieve better business outcomes faster.” 

DESIGNING A CHANNEL FRIENDLY POLICY
A well-framed and channel-friendly policy is underpinned by trust and aligns with the goals of the partnership network, with a win-win mindset at its core. They should emphasize strong collaboration across the ecosystem, continuous support for channel partners, and support scalable models that help drive sustainable growth for the ecosystem. 
“Snowflake's channel approach focuses on continued rapid growth, incredible momentum, and innovation, positioning itself as the data platform of choice across industries, and growing a robust ecosystem of partners. We focus on building technical capabilities among partners, fostering innovation through app ecosystem development, and collaborating with resellers and cloud providers,” says Dhiraj. “Our goal is to make the Snowflake Partner Network the number one ecosystem for data apps and AI. Our channel policies are framed with these fundamental tenets.  “To power our growth, we have significantly invested in developing a robust Snowflake Partner Network, consisting of a broad array of cloud, services, technology, data providers, advisory firms, system integrators (SIs), and specialized resellers to scale customer outcomes. Our ecosystem comprises advisory partners like Deloitte and EY, Global System Integrators like LTI Mindtree and TCS, and Regional System Integrators like Quantiphi, Lumiq, Hoonartek, and BluePi, all of whom have helped major enterprises adopt Snowflake,” adds Dhiraj.
Moreover, Snowflake was built on public cloud infrastructure and can deliver a unified experience across multiple clouds (GCP, AWS, and MSFT) and regions. Snowflake recognizes the importance of cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft in driving the success of its customers and partners. Its partnerships with companies like Nvidia further enhance its AI capabilities. These partnerships demonstrate a shared investment in the success of Snowflake's ecosystem, and contribute to its overall growth.
Snowflake has also expanded its customer-facing teams in India to ensure its clients derive maximum value from their investments in Snowflake. The partner ecosystem has partnered with Snowflake extensively on this journey to drive customer success.
With almost half of Snowflake’s APJ ecosystem in India, local partners also play a crucial role in its global success.