Dan Waters talks co-sold deals, EMEA evolution and partner network
Following Snowflake’s positive full-year results announced at the beginning of March, CRN caught up with Dan Waters, GVP EMEA partners, to find out how the vendor is addressing its partner organisation and where it’s headed in the new financial year.
Waters explains that the UK represents Snowflake’s “biggest market in EMEA”, even if it “sometimes gets pushed from some of [Snowflake’s] other territories, which creates a healthy competition.”
The country currently represents “about a third” of the vendor’s business in the region.
The company also has “aspirations for EMEA growth,” as Waters wants the territory to “double its revenue share in the global business.
In Q4 FY25, EMEA represented 16 per cent of Snowflake’s global revenue.
“As we continue to invest and grow, that will continue to be a stronger and stronger contribution,” says Waters.
“Over the next three to four years, we want to have about a third of the business in EMEA from a global perspective.
“Everything we’re doing around territories, around go-to-market, around partners, and how we drive that together, is focused on that growth trajectory that that we’ve got baked into our plans.”
To achieve its ambitions, the data cloud company intends to open new markets.
In December 2024, it launched in Saudia Arabia through the establishment of a new regional headquarters in Riyadh.
“I’m putting a partner manager in South Africa as well,” adds Waters.
He explains that the company is working “with thousands of partners across EMEA,” around 1,000 of which are in the UK.
“We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of ISV partners.
“Our community of cloud service providers is made up of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
“But then in the SI space, we’re working with the GSIs, regional SIs, data partners, and boutique partners.
“We’ve been building out businesses within the UK specifically to look at things like the public sector for instance.
“We’re also working with partners like Softcat, and more recently Computacenter.
“But that is not looking at the bigger picture, because these are just partners that have access to our Snowflake partner network.”
Partner ecosystem
Across the world, the vendor boasts of “a very broad ecosystem.”
“There are thousands of partners that have onboarded into our Snowflake partner network and have access to our systems, our processes, deal registration, and collateral that we make available.”
The data cloud giant also wants to make sure that all partners feel included, as it wants to “make sure that partners who are maybe not known to Snowflake today have got the right capability to fast track themselves through the partner network.
“For example, there are partners out there that maybe haven’t worked with Snowflake on AI in the past and who can add different skills and capability that we need in the ecosystem,” says Waters.
The company also want to “double down on partners that are doubling down on Snowflake.”
“It’s only right that if there’s an investment from partners, that we reciprocate by building a joint go-to-market strategy to accelerate our growth together.
“We’ve got a phenomenal ecosystem that’s powering so many great customer innovations, so we want to give partners the opportunity to accelerate through those tiers and be easily identifiable for adding great value.
“It might be regionally, it might be vertically, it might be from a domain perspective, it might be specific to us, or it could be broad, it could be big with the likes of the work that we’re doing with Accenture, Deloitte, EY, Capgemini.
“There is some phenomenal growth that we’re seeing at the very top end of the spectrum.”
Sliding through new territories
The vendor also frequently strengthens its offering through acquisition, such as the one of US-based advanced data integration technology developer Datavolo in November last year.
The GVP EMEA partners refers to the buyout as “a customer play in alignment with cloud service providers.”
“We only deliver on cloud, so it’s important that we’ve got the right interlock and the right plans in place with the appropriate cloud service providers in those markets.”
The company has also gone live in Saudi Arabia with Google, which launched a new cloud region in Qatar in 2023.
Microsoft was the first one to deliver cloud services from datacentres in the Middle East with the launch of cloud regions in UAE.
Waters is also focusing on Europe, as Snowflake “opened up a new AWS region in Zurich about five months ago” and intends “to add some local feet on the street into Belgium later this year.”
The vendor has also been active in the Nordics, as it added some sales and partner presence into the Norwegian market last year.
“We will be extending where it makes sense,” says Waters.
Channel involvement
Waters describes partners as being “incredibility critical for [Snowflake]” in terms of pipeline and customers connections.
“Our partners have got very tried and trusted long serving relationships across the segmentation of our sales territories.”
According to Waters, partners provide Snowflake with a seniority it doesn’t yet have, as the company is 12 years old.
He refers to them as “critical for [Snowflake] in terms of understanding the customers’ trajectory, what’s on their roadmap, how they are thinking about growth, and how they are thinking about strategy.
“In EMEA, in Q3, about 75 per cent of the deals that we closed were co-sold with a partner.
“It’s not just about signing a contract, it’s about how we, collectively, with Snowflake resources and partner resources, can accelerate the time to value for our clients that have committed to Snowflake on the contract.
“Partners are also really important in our own professional services, because they have the skills, the competencies, and the capabilities to run the migrations or to move the data workloads around onto snowflake so that the client is getting very quick time to value.
“We often see a client may work with Snowflake on a specific use case or a specific workload, so our partners can help us uncover what else that customer could be doing with Snowflake across their data estate, and help us in discovery phase to look at the roadmap and the next steps with those clients as it pertains to their Snowflake journey.”
Fresh new partner programme
The vendor also made changes to its partner programme in 2024, mainly around its resale model, “to be focused on customer acquisition and to focus on investment into our partners to drive outcomes with our clients.”
“Of our eight core values, the first one is customer first.”
Snowflake’s eight core values are as follows: put customers first; integrity always; think big; make each other the best; be excellent; get it done; own it; embrace each other’s differences.
“We think in terms of how we can really solve our customers’ needs in the most effective way possible, not only for now, but for future as well,” explains Waters.
“We think about how our clients can derive more value from Snowflake, we’re always thinking about how to raise the bar.”
