Former Microsoft Executive Vijayant Rai Joins Snowflake As New India MD

Data cloud company Snowflake has roped in former Microsoft executive Vijayant Rai as its new managing director for India. 

In his role, Rai will be responsible for driving business growth and the go-to-market strategy for Snowflake in the country.

Rai succeeds Vimal Venkatram who has moved to a regional role for Snowflake based in Singapore.

With over 27 years of senior sales experience, Rai will spearhead Snowflake’s business expansion across India, overseeing strategy, sales and execution, fostering strategic partnership engagements across the country, and driving the adoption of its data cloud across various industries, such as retail and CPG, manufacturing, public sector, startups, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and BFSI.

Prior to joining Snowflake, Rai held the position of executive director at Microsoft India, where he served as the country leader for the BFSI industry segment. Before that, he held leadership roles at Salesforce, SAP and CA Technologies.

“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,” Rai said.

Sanjay Deshmukh, senior vice president of ASEAN and India, Snowflake added, “We believe that our business in India is at an inflection point of wider adoption across all industries, and with Vijayant’s successful track record in building and scaling businesses, we are confident that he will spearhead our expansion in the local market and drive strong growth across all of our portfolios.” 

Snowflake, established in July 2012 and publicly launched in October 2014 after two years in stealth mode, provides a service for cloud-based data storage and analytics.

Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the data cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development and data sharing. 

The rising demand for cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) has prompted global platforms to explore India’s lucrative but less-explored SME sector. 

Despite resistance to shift from traditional processes, cloud computing has become a critical growth factor for small businesses, with approximately 35% of Indian SMBs expected to migrate a significant portion of their core workloads to the cloud by 2024, according to IDC. 

With more than 63 Mn SMEs in India and the cloud computing market set to reach $17.8 Bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 23.4%, tech giants like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are already gunning for this market. 

As cloud usage continues to grow, businesses are recognising the importance of understanding and controlling the costs associated with cloud resources.