The company is moving its partners in India from migration to AI as Cortex and Intelligence drive the next wave of revenue.
(Left: Mr. Dheeraj Narang, Director and Head of Partnerships, Snowflake India; Right: Mr. Vijayanth Rai, Managing Director, Snowflake India)
Snowflake is driving the Indian partner ecosystem to move beyond data migration and resale-driven efforts as it focuses on AI-driven use cases and business outcomes.
“We want our partners to move up the value chain to AI and business outcomes,” Dheeraj Narang, Snowflake’s India director and head of partnerships, told CRN India, adding that traditional migration work is increasingly becoming a commodity.
This change is related to a focus on Snowflake’s services, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex, which the company sees as the next stage of growth for its partner ecosystem. These capabilities enable partners to build use cases across departments such as sales, marketing, risk, and supply chain while driving measurable outcomes such as cost savings and increased revenue.
This position also applies in times of increased competition. Snowflake differentiates itself by accelerating time to value, providing deeper monetization opportunities for partners, and focusing on outcomes-driven delivery, Narang said.
Beyond migration to AI-driven outcomes
The company is looking to expand its partner ecosystem across all functions, including data engineering, analytics, and AI. “In today’s AI-driven landscape, partners need to be able to effectively leverage Snowflake Intelligence, and that requires strong domain expertise,” said Narang.
Partners need to move up the value chain by developing deep capabilities and participating in business-driven conversations. This means focusing on outcomes that matter to customers, such as increasing revenue and optimizing costs, rather than just technical execution.
“We have received significant interest from our partners in India and we expect continued expansion next year, both in terms of adding new partners and growing existing partners,” Narang said.
From a partner revenue cycle perspective, engagement begins with co-selling and reselling, followed by implementation. The first tier of revenue is driven by data engineering, which brings enterprise data into the platform and builds the foundation.
However, Snowflake encourages partners to move beyond this stage.
Narang said sustainable revenue growth will depend on partners’ ability to deliver continued business value. It focuses on delivering tangible results to customers, whether through cost optimization or revenue generation.
Snowflake Intelligence enables these use cases, and Cortex accelerates development and deployment, he added.
Snowflake is invested in enabling our partners to bring these products to market, operate them, and scale customer success. We focus on ensuring that our partners can build reproducible, high-impact use cases, rather than being limited to one-off data projects.
“From an industry perspective, financial services remains the biggest opportunity, followed by manufacturing and retail, where the scale of data and complexity of operations is creating strong demand for AI-driven solutions,” said Narang.
Snowflake shifts partner focus from resale to consumption-driven growth
With Snowflake’s modern partner framework, revenue is no longer limited to upfront trading margin. Instead, partners can earn revenue across streams such as resale margins, backend consumption, services, and service-linked incentives.
“Our partners play a critical role not only in closing deals, but also in growing our accounts over the long term, in line with Snowflake’s global ‘find land and grow’ strategy,” Narang said.
“Partners now have multiple revenue streams, including resale margins, back-end consumption, services, and service subscription incentives. By combining these elements, partners can generate meaningful financial returns,” Narang added.
“At Snowflake, we invest in enabling partners with deep platform expertise to help accelerate time to value for our customers. In many cases, large-scale data migrations, reaching multiple petabytes, can be completed within weeks compared to months in traditional environments,” Snowflake’s managing director for India, Vijayant Rai, told CRN India.
According to Rai, this allows partners to quickly demonstrate value and start generating revenue from implementation early.
Additionally, he added that Snowflake enables partners to build capabilities across business domains such as finance, sales and marketing, supply chain, financial risk management, and CRM.
Snowflake works with partners to build centers of excellence (CoEs) across sales, presales, delivery, and domain teams.
This model supports revenue generation through resale and services while increasing platform consumption, Lai said.
The platform enables rapid execution of use cases across industries, such as inventory optimization, with clear cost and revenue impact.
In one example, the partners were able to pivot their ongoing efforts with Snowflake and close the deal within four weeks after proving business value, Rai said.
India’s strong growth puts pressure on talent and partners to perform
The company said India continues to be one of the fastest growing markets in the world, with strong year-on-year growth in customer spending driven by both new acquisitions and expansion within its existing base.
The company has also doubled its domestic sales team in the past year, with half of APJ partners now based in India.
Rai said Snowflake follows a consumption-based model, where revenue is recognized only when customers use compute and storage. In addition to reported revenue, the company tracks remaining performance obligations (RPO), which represent contracted but unconsumed revenue.
Snowflake reported fourth quarter 2026 product revenue of $1.23 billion. This reflects a 30% year-over-year increase and demonstrates strong consumption-led growth on the platform, Lai said.
At the same time, RPO was $9.77 billion, representing contract revenue that has not yet been recognized. Of this, about 48%, or about $4.69 billion, is expected to be realized over the next 12 months, Lai added.
This momentum is putting pressure on partners’ execution, particularly when it comes to talent retention.
“There is a clear demand for skilled talent in the ecosystem,” Narang said.
To address this, Snowflake is investing in talent development through multiple initiatives in India. This includes a partnership with NASSCOM under the ‘Million Minds’ program and a collaboration with ICT Academy focused on a train-the-trainer model.
The company also runs developer-focused programs such as North Star and Build in multiple cities, alongside targeted partner support through SPN Learn and Partner Champions initiatives.
These efforts will help expand the talent pool as demand continues to outstrip supply, especially as partners take on more complex AI-driven initiatives.
When it comes to pricing, Snowflake continues to favor a consumption-based model, positioning itself as flexible across customer segments.
“To further support the Indian market, the company has set up a local subsidiary, introduced Indian rupee-based billing, and enabled customers to transact in Indian rupees through partners,” Rai said.
Customers can also source Snowflake through direct purchase, partner-driven models, and cloud marketplaces like AWS and Microsoft Azure, Narang said, but customers who prefer to transact in U.S. dollars can still do so.
For our partners, this means the opportunity in India remains strong, but their ability to expand their offering will depend on how quickly they can develop and deploy skilled talent to meet growing demand.
