Snowflake’s growth philosophy for ASEAN explained

“We want to leave a legacy in ASEAN and not just be another technology vendor selling its tools,” says Satchit Joglekar, Managing Director for ASEAN at Snowflake.

Snowflake continues to experience remarkable growth in the Asia Pacific region. Having established its presence some six years ago, Snowflake has grown to be one of the top data management companies in the region, serving clients in various sectors and industries.

In Southeast Asia, Snowflake has over 200 customers across the region. Contributing to Snowflake’s growth in the region is its strong partner ecosystem as well as the team it has in place in the region to support both customers and partners.

CRN Asia caught up with Snowflake’s Satchit Joglekar. Joglekar was recently appointed Managing Director for ASEAN at Snowflake. In the discussion, Joglekar shares more about his philosophy for growth in the region as well as the relationship Snowflake has with its partner ecosystem as it continues to expand its footprint in ASEAN.

Can you tell us a bit about Snowflake’s growth in the region?

When we started Snowflake in Asia, Singapore was our base outside of Australia. Over the years, we got our good share of customers across industries in Singapore. Three years ago, we decided we'll go into ASEAN proper because ASEAN can't be covered just by being based out of Singapore.

Our first bet was into Indonesia and Philippines, that was our first two expansions. But what's exciting for me most right now is this year, we are going all-in into all of ASEAN. We will be truly pan-ASEAN in terms of our market coverage and in terms of our presence as well. We have teams in Indonesia and in the Philippines. We are now hiring and scaling a team in Malaysia, which is our next big bet. We started focusing on Malaysia about 12 to 18 months ago, and we've always covered Malaysia from Singapore.

But this year is the year where we have people on the ground in Kuala Lumpur, across sales and technical functions, covering all our Malaysian customers. That's an investment we are excited about. And then the next one we are very excited about is Thailand, where we are also putting people as well.

We now have local presence in five major economies now, which is Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand. And that's super exciting for us that we are going local and pan-ASEAN.

As we go local, we are also instituting not just local teams, but also local management. While we have enterprise leaders covering all of the key enterprises, public sector and other customers in the market, I also have a territory or a commercial team that will look after those mid-market or digital natives or startup customers as well.

As such, we have coverage across all the major countries in the region and also across all the different tiers of market, whether it's enterprise, mid-market, territory, commercial, startup, digital natives and such.

What is your philosophy for growth in the region?

As we expand, it's not just about expanding and having a presence. I believe there's a lot of good intelligence out there to say that Snowflake is one of the most, if not the most, consequential data and AI company in the market today.

Now, saying that comes with it a lot of responsibility. That means we have the opportunity and the responsibility also to affect societal change. Data and AI is not just IT infrastructure or it's not just a tool, right? It is enabling societal change.

It is going to help people be more productive. It is going to save money for companies. It is going to create entirely new jobs. It is going to help governments govern citizens better.

So, when we hire the people who are going to be expanding our presence across the region, we are also making sure that these people actually have that passion about affecting societal change, about doing good, using data and AI, because that's the legacy. In the end, we want to leave that legacy in ASEAN and not just be another technology vendor selling their tools.

As you're expanding into these markets and covering these markets as well and building your presence there, how are partners supporting your growth?

The partner ecosystem we are building also are the right kind of partners that believe in that mission, that are here with us for the long run, and they want to also bring about true business value as well as affect societal change for years to come. And so, we are building an ecosystem, again, aligned to our growth, which is not just having a few partners that will cover the region.

Of course, we believe in focus, but we also believe in localization. We have a partner ecosystem in all of these countries that I mentioned. It's already groomed, and we are creating local partners in the ecosystem, or some of the newer countries, we are bringing them up as we go into the country.

We have a good mix of three kinds of partners. First, there are local partners which focus specifically on that country itself, whether it's Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore. Secondly, we have what we call RSIs, which are pan-ASEAN. So, they have a Singapore base, usually, and they have presence and ability to cover customers across ASEAN.

And then we have a third breed of partners, which is our global SIs and GSIs. They obviously also have been present in ASEAN for many years and now look at Snowflake as central to their data and AI strategy as they bring about transformation projects across all the largest enterprises in the region.

So, we have partners across all of these different tiers. And that's also the exciting part because all these different types of partners are able to service all our different customers that we are setting up our teams to cover.

Hence, the partner ecosystem absolutely has to be aligned to our sales GTM, particularly in ASEAN because ASEAN is a partner ecosystem-led market. Customers in ASEAN trust our channel ecosystem and that is absolutely critical for our success.

Speaking of customers, are you looking at any new specific industries in the region as well?

In the region, we have north of 200 customers, but what's exciting us is that we are not happy with staying in the hundreds. We want to get into the thousands as that's the potential that Snowflake has.

Globally, we are aiming to grow from 10,000 plus customers to 100,000 customers over the next three or five years. Likewise, in ASEAN also, our aim is to 10x that, if not more.

And that growth is going to come in a couple of ways. We have expanded in the region to give the customers the trust that Snowflake is here to stay, and we can have many more enterprises across all our different ASEAN countries gravitate to Snowflake along with our partner ecosystem that's going help them along.

Apart from that, we are also heavily verticalizing our go-to-market strategy. Our leading industries have always been financial services, retail, manufacturing, energy, oil and gas, telecommunications, travel and hospitality. These are some of the key industries globally.

In ASEAN, we see huge upside in the financial services ecosystem, both in what I would say the traditional banks and insurance companies and asset managers, but also in the thriving fintech ecosystem that we have in the digital banks and the neobanks that are sprouting up across the region to look after our unbanked population across ASEAN, right. Many of them are already customers, for example, GXS Bank.

Telco has traditionally, in ASEAN for Snowflake, been a very strong sector for us. Retail is another sector that is very exciting for us because ASEAN has a 600 million population and a thriving retail ecosystem both on the bricks and mortar but also the e-commerce side and that is our next top industry. And then not to forget the manufacturing industry, especially with smart manufacturing coming into play with IoT and Snowflake's ability to handle all types of data with the volume and velocity of that data that is being generated.

Besides these key industries, a lot of ASEAN organizations are part of conglomerate structures across the region. Within a conglomerate, there could be a bank, a telco, a retailer or even a mall operator and such. And they all have very rich and very powerful insights and also data that they can mobilize.

However, what's happening currently is because of independent ways of operations and stuff like that, it's the power of a single customer view or the ability to help each other within the conglomerate with the data that they have is slightly limited. That's the opportunity in front of us because Snowflake's unique ability to enable secure data exchanges, to enable internal marketplaces of data within a conglomerate.

It's about breaking down data silos, not just within the company but across the ecosystem within the conglomerate. That is very exciting and it’s a big opportunity.