Snowflake says no plans to launch R&D centre in India now

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Snowflake has no concrete plans to immediately set up a research and development (R&D) centre in India, contrary to what it said earlier this year, as it focuses on getting its products more ingrained in its client ecosystem and localising them to suit their needs.

 

However, Christian Kleinerman, the company’s executive vice president of products, told Business Standard in a recent interaction there is no “concrete plan” and neither a “firm timeline” by when the development centre will be opened in Asia’s third largest economy.

 

“The real criteria by which we decide when to open a R&D centre is when the existing ones are large enough to offer career advancements and mobility. We have such locations in five centres; San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Warsaw, and Berlin. Once these offices have a critical mass, then we will think about the next ones.”

 

The AI data cloud company, which entered India just about five years ago and counts Bajaj General Insurance and Indigo among its clients, is betting on rising cloud and AI adoption in India that will fuel its growth opportunity.

 

In June this year, Sridhar Ramaswamy, the cloud data storage company’s CEO, said that he was committed to grow the India business and build capabilities to drive enterprise tech work out of its Pune centre of excellence (CoE). “To this extent, we are also actively considering setting up our R&D center in India soon,” he said, without disclosing any timelines.

 

A small percent of Snowflake’s revenue comes from India now, considering Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) contribute just six percent to the topline, while almost 80 percent comes from the US.

 

Vijayant Rai, managing director, Snowflake India, said the company has doubled its go-to market (GTM) team in the country to focus on local enterprises such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and logistics.

 

“Financial services is right up there in the ecosystem that includes asset management companies. There is a lot of focus on data consolidation as most of the enterprise data are in silos. Cloud platforms like us apply AI on it to get the benefits. We are also looking for opportunities in IoT, automobiles and getting plant data on Snowflake platform,” Rai added.

 

Snowflake has more than 600 employees in India and plans to add at close to 100 people by the end of this year across sales, operations, solutions engineering, marketing, and the CoE.