In a joint interaction with CRN India, Dhiraj Narang, Director and Head of Partnerships, Snowflake, India and Praveen Sridhar, Head of Partner Business, AWS India and South Asia explain how their partnership is helping businesses modernise their data platforms and accelerate GenAI adoption. They further highlight how their collaboration has already resulted in 28 product integrations and is enabling faster time-to-value for joint customers.
Can you walk us through the evolution of Snowflake’s partnership with AWS? What were some of the defining moments in this collaboration?
Dhiraj Narang: Snowflake’s partnership with AWS, built on a shared commitment to customer success, has evolved from a technical foundation to a strategic collaboration. A key milestone was the March 2023 Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA), a multi-year expansion of our partnership, wherein both companies aligned on developing tighter integrations between the two platforms and jointly expanding our go-to-market efforts. The expansion of the collaboration will take a deep, multi-faceted approach to fuel growth and drive customer-focused innovation through industry solutions.
The agreement enabled over 28 native AWS service integrations, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, empowering customers to build secure AI and ML solutions. Snowflake’s recognition as the AWS 2023 Data and Analytics ISV Partner of the Year – Global and the 2024 APJ and India Technology Partner of the Year highlights our shared commitment to innovation. With the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, scaling across 22 AWS Regions, and our joint work on Apache Iceberg with the Polaris Catalog has further advanced our partnership, delivering flexibility and governance for data-driven insights. These moments reflect how our collaboration, rooted in Snowflake’s AWS foundation, continues to drive global innovation.
Praveen Sridhar: The Snowflake-AWS partnership represents one of the most significant ISV collaborations in cloud computing, beginning in 2014 when Snowflake launched exclusively on AWS’s infrastructure. This strategic decision leveraged AWS’s market leadership and global reach, leading to a decade of deep technical integration across more than 28 AWS services. Snowflake is available in 22 WW Regions and runs 10% faster on AWS and is Graviton optimised.
The partnership serves thousands of mutual enterprise customers across key industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing, with Snowflake now supporting over 11,000 customers globally. The collaboration continues to evolve with a focus on enhanced AI/ML capabilities, industry-specific solutions, and joint sustainability initiatives, demonstrating how AWS’s infrastructure can enable transformative cloud-native solutions at scale. At re:Invent 2023, Snowflake was recognised as the Global Data and Analytics Partner of the Year. In 2024, Snowflake was also recognised as the Technology Partner of the Year at the AWS Summit in India.
Snowflake also has multiple AWS Competencies, including most recently the GenAI Software Competency (ML Competency, Data & Analytics Competency, Amazon Sagemaker Ready, AWS PrivateLink Ready, and more).
How has AWS supported Snowflake’s growth journey globally and specifically in India?
Dhiraj Narang: AWS has been integral to our growth globally and in India, providing the scalable cloud foundation for the Snowflake AI Data Cloud across 22 AWS regions. This enables seamless data management and governance, with many of our customers running on AWS. Integrations with AWS services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker enhance our AI and ML offerings. At the same time, a strong, joint go-to-market helps solve complex customer problems, accelerating customer adoption in India.
AWS supports Snowflake’s expansion in India through collaborative efforts to modernise legacy data platforms, particularly in sectors like financial services, retail, CPG, and digital natives. Customers like Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, Swiggy, Dezerv, and Chalo leverage our combined solutions to drive business outcomes. We are working together across complex use cases such as helping customers solve financial crime, fraud and cybersecurity, personalisation and customer 360, delivery route optimisation, and performance analytics of the asset portfolio. AWS’s local expertise and joint, robust partner ecosystem in India help us deliver tailored, innovative solutions that foster data-driven growth.
Praveen Sridhar: AWS approaches how we partner differently. We lead with the customer first and design our strategies to enable AWS Partners to deliver high-quality AWS solutions and services to joint customers. AWS provides partners with innovative programs and services to build and grow their businesses. We help partners reduce the time to value, so they can quickly recognise and grow their profits. Just as we obsess over our customers, we also obsess over our partners. AWS works with many local businesses through the partner program. The AWS Partner Network (APN) is the global partner program for technology and consulting businesses that leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for AWS customers.
AWS has played a pivotal role in Snowflake’s global expansion and particularly in India through a deeply integrated go-to-market strategy and technical collaboration. The partnership leverages AWS’s extensive field presence and marketplace capabilities, enabling Snowflake to effectively reach and serve customers across diverse markets. In India specifically, the collaboration with AWS field teams has been instrumental in understanding local customer data requirements, leading to more targeted solution delivery.
The integration between Snowflake’s platform and AWS services has created a seamless experience for customers’ data analytics and AI needs, while the AWS Marketplace has served as a crucial distribution channel, simplifying the procurement process. This shared customer-first approach has resulted in several successful joint customer engagements, where both companies work together to understand and address specific customer challenges. The partnership exemplifies how AWS’s global infrastructure and local market expertise can help technology partners like Snowflake scale their operations effectively while maintaining high standards of customer service and technical integration.
Are there standout customer success stories that highlight how AWS and Snowflake together are solving real business challenges?
Dhiraj Narang: Snowflake and AWS believe delivering the best possible customer experience is key to our strategy and growth. By joining forces to serve customer data needs and provide tailor-made solutions, Snowflake and AWS are helping over 6,000 joint customers globally, including Fortune 500 companies.
Leveraging data effectively is crucial for gaining a competitive edge in today’s market. Snowflake and AWS provide a powerful partnership that enables organisations to maximize their data’s potential while maintaining compliance and accessibility. Our combined capabilities offer industry-tailored solutions that streamline data transformation, sharing, and analytics processes, helping businesses accelerate their growth and drive innovation more efficiently. We are committed to driving value-based outcomes for our customers.
We jointly work with many customers globally and in India. For example, Zoom has deployed Snowflake Cortex AI on AWS infrastructure to power advanced analytics and AI applications, showcasing our solutions’ scalability and security. Similarly, Siemens Energy has thousands of manufacturing manuals that need to be referenced and require significant research effort. By leveraging GenAI services from Snowflake (Cortex AI) and Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Comprehend, and Rekognition, they reduced the time needed to search and retrieve relevant information by 30%. These examples demonstrate how our collaboration addresses complex business challenges with a robust data platform.
Praveen Sridhar: A compelling example of AWS and Snowflake’s joint impact can be seen in our collaboration with Swiggy, India’s leading hyper-local commerce platform. With over 3 billion orders delivered across 680+ cities in India, Swiggy faced significant challenges with its legacy data warehouse, including frequent memory leaks that disrupted business operations and required substantial engineering resources for maintenance.
The implementation of Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud on AWS transformed Swiggy’s data operations, delivering remarkable improvements in performance and efficiency. The solution enabled Swiggy to achieve 3.7x more queries per day with 20% faster execution times, while reducing the failure rate of long-running queries by 92%. They achieved a 1.8x reduction in cost per query. The platform’s reliability allowed Swiggy to process terabytes of daily data, with 90% of queries completing in under 100 seconds.
Beyond pure performance metrics, the solution enabled strategic business improvements, such as optimizing delivery driver allocation in high-demand areas. This use case demonstrates how the AWS-Snowflake partnership delivers not just technical improvements but tangible business value, supporting Swiggy’s continued innovation in the hyperlocal commerce industry through better data analytics and predictive modeling capabilities.
Which industry verticals are seeing the most traction from the AWS-Snowflake collaboration in India? Any particular use cases that stand out?
Dhiraj Narang: In India, our partnership is gaining traction in financial services, retail, CPG, and digital natives, driven by demand for AI and GenAI. Bajaj Allianz General Insurance is leveraging Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to help its business teams leverage these insights from their data to understand business metrics, make informed decisions, and respond swiftly to customer needs. Bajaj Allianz’s transition to Snowflake has augmented its data management approach by integrating data from diverse structured sources into a unified platform. This implementation will help create personalised insurance products, enhance fraud and anomaly detection, and optimize pricing in real-time across its businesses.
Another example of our partnership is at Chalo, India’s leading bus transport technology company, which is harnessing AI and digitisation to unlock massive value for both passengers and operators. Chalo uses ML and AI solutions and massive real-time and historical data to predict bus ETAs accurately. Their prediction model also considers the type of bus, the nature of the bus route, the time of the day, and other factors to improve accuracy of the ETA predicted. Chalo migrated its entire reporting stack to Snowflake as a source of data. With that, they have seen significant improvements in the speed of delivering new reports, insights, and analysis to their customers, without worrying about price or performance. It has also helped them generate unified insights, enabling them to optimise bus routes and personalize user recommendations.
Snowflake products like Streamlit and Cortex AI also allow product and operations teams to query data in natural language. This simplifies complex data analysis tasks and empowers non-technical users to extract insights without deep knowledge of SQL or database structures. Overall, it has helped them strengthen their data-driven culture.
Similarly, Retail and CPG customers integrate Snowflake with Amazon Vendor Central data for better demand forecasting and inventory optimisation.
Praveen Sridhar: The AWS-Snowflake collaboration in India has demonstrated particularly strong momentum in the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) sector, which has emerged as the clear leader in joint customer adoption. While the partnership is seeing growth across multiple segments, including Startup (SUP) and Scale segments, the ISV vertical stands out for its exceptional traction and successful implementations.
The financial services industry (FSI) has also begun showing promising momentum, marking a strategic expansion of the partnership’s market reach. This success can be attributed to the collaboration’s ability to provide tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of software companies while simultaneously addressing the stringent compliance and security requirements of the financial sector. The partnership’s focus on delivering scalable, cost-effective solutions with quick time-to-market capabilities has resonated particularly well with these verticals, setting a strong foundation for continued growth in the Indian market.
India is emerging as a hotbed for GenAI and data innovation. How are AWS and Snowflake working together to empower Indian businesses to ride this wave?
Dhiraj Narang: Data is the foundation of modern business, underpinning every application, process, and decision. By leveraging data to fuel generative AI initiatives, companies can boost productivity, build differentiated experiences, and innovate faster. AWS and Snowflake collaborate closely to support customers in their generative AI journeys. Our partnership spans product development and partner ecosystems and provides comprehensive guidance for data-driven AI strategies.
We offer flexible integration options to meet diverse customer needs. For example, Snowflake customers can seamlessly connect to Amazon Bedrock and use its library of foundation models with data in Snowflake while maintaining high security and governance over the data. Together, we address industry-specific GenAI use cases, such as medical imaging and claims processing in Healthcare, credit decision-making in Banking, and Generative AI-powered product/vehicle maintenance, service/repair aide, and repair assistant in Automotive and Manufacturing. A combination of Snowflake and AWS in GenAI simplifies data management and accelerates customers’ AI transformation initiatives.
Praveen Sridhar: AWS and Snowflake are strategically positioned to accelerate India’s generative AI and data innovation journey through our integrated approach to data management and AI capabilities. Through Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud powered by AWS’s robust infrastructure, Indian businesses are gaining access to unified data solutions that eliminate traditional silos and reduce hidden costs while maintaining stringent governance standards.
The partnership is particularly relevant in India’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, where businesses are increasingly seeking to leverage AI for competitive advantage. The collaboration enables Indian organisations to not only store and process massive amounts of data but also to derive actionable insights through advanced analytics and AI/ML capabilities. This is achieved through seamless integration between Snowflake’s platform and AWS’s AI services, allowing customers to create more personalised and relevant experiences for their end users in real-time.
The focus on superior TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and enhanced query performance has made this solution particularly attractive to Indian businesses, who can now compete effectively on a global scale while maintaining local data sovereignty and compliance requirements. This partnership is helping to democratise access to advanced AI and data capabilities, enabling businesses of all sizes across India to participate in the GenAI revolution while maintaining cost efficiency and operational excellence.
Could you elaborate more about the AWS-Snowflake Ambassador Program?
Dhiraj Narang: The AWS-Snowflake Ambassador Program enhances our partnership by building deep technical expertise in India. It cross-trains AWS Solution Architects and Professional Services teams on Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, while Snowflake teams deepen their AWS knowledge, significantly increasing skilled resources.
The program also engages our partner ecosystem, collaborating with system integrators to develop industry-specific AI/ML use cases, such as the Industry Data Fabric for manufacturing and the Epic Plus initiative for healthcare, ensuring customers benefit from tailored, high-impact solutions.
Praveen Sridhar: The program combines the technical depth of both AWS and Snowflake, offering both in-person and online training formats to ensure maximum accessibility and effectiveness. This program serves as a crucial element in building a skilled workforce capable of implementing and managing Snowflake solutions on AWS infrastructure, particularly important given India’s growing demand for cloud and data professionals. The Ambassador Program not only helps create a pool of certified experts but also strengthens the ecosystem of AWS-Snowflake professionals who can support the increasing adoption of these technologies across Indian businesses.
With the rapid pace of change in AI and cloud, how do you see your joint strategy evolving to stay ahead of the curve?
Dhiraj Narang: Snowflake and AWS have established a comprehensive strategic partnership that spans multiple dimensions of collaboration. Our joint strategy evolves through innovation and customer focus to lead in AI and cloud advancements. We’re expanding integrations like Snowflake Cortex AI with Amazon Bedrock to deliver GenAI use cases, such as real-time analytics and personalization.
Our alliance focuses on developing industry-specific Data Cloud solutions across sectors like Financial Services, Media & Advertising, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Retail, and Telecom, while continuously expanding into new industries. The partnership features enhanced product integrations, including machine learning/AI capabilities and performance improvements through AWS Graviton instances. We continue strengthening our collaboration across global markets and increasing joint field alignment to facilitate large-scale cloud migrations.
Additionally, we maintain a strong go-to-market alliance through coordinated awareness campaigns, ensuring customers can fully leverage our combined solutions and innovations. AWS and Snowflake continue driving data and AI innovation by aligning our roadmaps and prioritizing customer outcomes.
Praveen Sridhar: The AWS-Snowflake strategic partnership continues to evolve in response to the rapid advancement of AI and cloud technologies, with a clear focus on innovation and customer value delivery through the AI Data Cloud platform. Our joint strategy emphasises the transformation from traditional, siloed data architectures to a unified data approach, enabling both local and global collaboration while unlocking new business opportunities through advanced analytics and AI capabilities.
The partnership’s future direction is centered on three key areas – enhanced AI/ML integration with AWS’s comprehensive AI services, continued cost optimization through improved query performance and resource utilization, and strengthened governance frameworks that ensure robust data security and compliance. By maintaining superior TCO while delivering high-performance standards, the collaboration is positioned to help organisations navigate the increasingly complex technological landscape. This strategic evolution reflects both companies’ commitment to staying ahead of the curve in AI and cloud innovation, ensuring customers can leverage cutting-edge capabilities while maintaining operational efficiency and strong governance standards.
