India has positioned itself as an important market for cloud providers: Snowflake

Snowflake was engineered to power the Data Cloud, where thousands of organizations have seamless access to explore, share, and unlock the true value of their data. Its cloud data platform shatters barriers that have prevented organizations of all sizes from unleashing the true value from their data.

Here, Vimal Venkatram, Country Manager, India, Snowflake, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How does data analytics assist various sectors to thrive post Covid-19?

Vimal Venkatram: The latest IDC survey reveals that 64 percent of Indian companies are looking to increase cloud infrastructure spending as a result of the Covid-19. Additionally, 56 percent of the respondents expect growth in cloud software investments from companies to respond to the needs of the new normal. Indeed, the pandemic has pushed businesses to accelerate their cloud adoption strategies to ensure business continuity.

Due to the enforced lock downs and the need to work remotely, operations were impacted and many companies were unable to access and fully utilize their data. Reliant on legacy technologies, many companies were caught off-guard and were unable to respond to business demands. As investments are redirected to cloud-based technologies and infrastructure, companies are becoming better equipped at managing future business disruptions.

In a post-Covid-19 world, organizations must leverage their valuable data assets to offer more value to the customers and empower the business to be future-ready. With the help of cloud technologies, issues like data silos and poor data quality are being addressed. This helps companies spend less time manually updating their data and more time to analyze and convert data into valuable insights.

Organizations can refocus their attention towards better understanding their customers' preferences and provide better customer experience based on the insights derived from their data.

DQ: How did Snowflake help in developing the ecosystem by providing cloud and data analytics services to Swiggyand the other startups?

Vimal Venkatram: Companies approach us with unique business needs. To ensure that we respond to each of our customer's specific issues, we carefully analyze their requirements before developing a tailored solution.

One of our first customers was Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery platform, which caters to millions of customers every month. Swiggy was experiencing challenges in their data warehouse, which were causing frequent memory leaks that blocked or stalled queries, especially during peak hours, and these ultimately affected their business.

We worked with Swiggy on a POC with 50 users and immediately set out to fully migrate Swiggy's data from their legacy system to Snowflake’s platform. Using Snowpipe, Swiggy's data was continuously ingested from various business systems into the Snowflake and augmenting ongoing batch data loads. Once ingested, all data was made available as tables to Swiggy’s data analysts, who use the data to create dashboards and reports.

With Snowflake, 90% of the inquiries were executed in less than 100 seconds, which improved the query speed of the food delivery platform. Orders were dispatched faster, resulting in more drivers accepting delivery and in turn serving more customers.

Another notable example is our partnership with Freight Tiger. As an end-to-end logistics network, Freight Tiger was looking for a platform that can seamlessly handle data from various sources, including semi-structured data. Additionally, Freight Tiger needed a solution that could support business expansion without impacting the current team strength.

As a result, Freight Tiger is now able to run ad hoc queries and retrieve up-to-date data from a combination of various sources, with the assurance that the data is always available for the team.

DQ: What is the impact of cloud and data analytics in the healthcare sector?

Vimal Venkatram: The healthcare industry generates vast amounts of data. To leverage the power of data, India's healthcare sector is gearing up for digitalization. The Indian healthcare industry report by IBEF estimates that the healthcare market will reach a value of Rs 8.6 trillion or US$ 133.44 billion by 2022.

With the help of cloud technologies and data analytics, the potential to improve overall patient care is immense. Healthcare organizations can now derive insights from their data that positively impact patient care and hospital operations and help medical professionals meet the service requirements of the country more efficiently.

As a cloud solutions company offering secure and seamless data sharing, Snowflake is helping healthcare institutions to derive insights that positively impact patient care and hospital operations. Care delivery processes are optimized and operations streamlined, allowing healthcare professionals to focus on providing a better customer experience.

With data analytics, patients receive personalized, proactive treatment plans and improved care delivery for better health outcomes.

DQ: How does Snowflake see India as a market in the coming time?

Vimal Venkatram: The Indian government has launched various initiatives such as Digital India and Start-up India to improve the country's digital connectivity. Additionally, with the growing cloud adoption rate among Indian businesses, the country has positioned itself as an important market for various cloud providers.

At Snowflake, we recognize the growing economic opportunities in the country. In response to this, we recently launched the Data Cloud – a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads.

Snowflake also announced the general availability of Snowflake on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in India this May. This allows our customers in India to keep their data within the country and leverage the flexibility and scalability offered by the Snowflake Data Cloud. The deployment will also encourage Indian organizations to utilize the instant elasticity offered by cloud. Our goal as a cloud provider is to help businesses grow by providing quick access to data safely and securely.

DQ: How are organizations tapping into the Data Cloud to securely share and consume live data?

Vimal Venkatram: Secure data sharing is a critical factor when talking about consuming live data. Traditional data sharing methods such as email or file transfer protocol (FTP) are not secure, not scalable, and does not support real-time updates. IT teams will need to spend more time deconstructing, scripting, securing, and governing the data.

Similarly, if the same data needs to be accessed by data consumers, they will need to spend time reconstructing, scripting, and rebuilding the data.

Snowflake Data Cloud allows seamless data sharing by providing companies access to secure, cloud-based data exchange capabilities. With its cloud-built architecture, data sharing eliminates the need to move or copy data. Those who are granted access simply reference the data in a controlled and secure manner, including across regions, cloud providers, and even companies.

To derive the most benefits from their data, companies must implement strategies to enhance their data sharing and collaboration capabilities. With the flexibility and scalability of Snowflake Data Cloud, businesses can share data seamlessly and securely.