“We can support all verticals that have a challenge with data”

As an industry veteran and the Country Manager for Snowflake India, Vimal Venkatram has his task clearly cut out. In an interaction with Shubhendu Parth, he shares some interesting insights and plans as he settles into a corner room that looks out at India with a new view of the market and opportunities here amidst COVID-19 crisis. Local data emphasis, governance services, startups, and new enterprise elasticity-needs that come with growth – can the Indian market be as unique as the company itself?

- Shubhendu Parth

Shubhendu Parth: You have been in Snowflake for a very long time. How do you look at the India market from the Country Manager’s perspective?

Vimal Venkatram (VV): In India, it is an interesting time to start, particularly because of COVID-19. However, we are seeing a lot of demand from a cloud computing perspective, for a number of sectors, particularly startups –there’s obviously a lot of government initiatives for the startup sector. We’ve also seen a bunch of initiatives around products and services, customers, retail, manufacturing, and healthcare. In fact, there’s a whole range of industries where we are seeing a fairly big upswing in the adoption of cloud and around data and analytics.

I’ve been in Singapore. I’ve had the unique perspective of seeing not just Singapore, but the entire Southeast Asia market across countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. India is definitely well placed compared to any economy when we think of cloud computing and data analytics, in particular.

SP: India has a fairly good amount of automation in the government and public sectors. Do you see cloud technology playing a much stronger role in the public sector in post-COVID India?