Snowflake Channel Chief Niederman: Partner Opportunity ‘Has Never Been Better’

‘Partners are our scale engine,’ Snowflake Channel Chief Chris Niederman says.

About two months into his role as Snowflake’s channel chief, Chris Niederman and his team are at work aligning the vendor’s partner program to the demands of Snowflake partners and working with the company’s own sales staff to improve co-selling with the channel.

Niederman–who joined the Bozeman, Mont.-based artificial intelligence, data analytics and cloud tools vendor from Amazon Web Services–told CRN in an interview that the vendor has revamped its reseller partner program with a better frontend discount as an example of a recent change made to the partner program.

“We have some pretty lofty goals,” said Niederman, who described Snowflake’s partner-first mentality as starting from the top with CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. “Partners are our scale engine. Partners are how we’re going to make this happen. … The opportunity has never been better for partners.”

[RELATED: Snowflake Recruits AWS Executive As New Channel Chief]

Snowflake Partner Program

Bronson Shafer, global leader for the Snowflake center of excellence at Seattle-based Slalom–No. 31 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that the company and Snowflake are working together to leverage new generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to better serve customers.

The CoE is one of the differentiators Slalom brings to Snowflake’s growing partner program, he said. The solution provider has been developing more solutions around the power of three with Slalom, Snowflake and the hyperscalers of AWS, Google and Microsoft.

“They fit very well into the current modern cloud stack,” Shafer said. “They have enormous potential for growth, and they have a very aggressive update schedule where they continue to push the needle.”

Niederman’s official title with Snowflake is senior vice president of alliances and channels. He joined Snowflake after 11-plus years with AWS. He succeeded previous Snowflake channel chief Tyler Prince, who left the company in April. Niederman credited Prince with helping to build the partner platform he is now building on.

Niederman left AWS with the title of managing director of the industries and solutions team, where he was “responsible for setting the AWS strategy and GTM initiatives in the field to grow in targeted industries through differentiated partner solutions built on AWS services,” according to his LinkedIn account.

His resume includes about seven years with VMware, leaving in 2014 as senior director of national partner sales. Niederman was “responsible for building and leading VMware’s first National Partner Sales Team focused on the largest and most strategic high growth partners in the Americas,” according to his LinkedIn account.

The new channel chief comes to Snowflake as its partner ecosystem explodes in growth from 600 partners in 2022 to more than 12,000 partners worldwide.

Here’s more of what Niederman had to say about Snowflake’s partner program. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you join Snowflake?

Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, all the folks I’ve known for the 11 years I was at AWS (Amazon Web Services). … (I asked), are they really leaning into Snowflake? Is Snowflake enterprise ready?

And boy, the message I’ve heard reaffirmed my decision to join. They were like, ‘The time is right. Snowflake has changed how (it is) thinking about partnering. … And we want to lean in harder than ever because we believe that Snowflake is at the right place at the right time for where we’re at.’

I go back to 11 years (ago) when the cloud was coming about. And I was focused on the GSIs (global system integrators) at AWS. And it was like, ‘OK, (are) Accenture (and other GSIs) going to lean in or not?’

They know how it’s played out, and this is just the next inflection point with data and AI. And where we’re at with our mission to empower every single enterprise’s achievable potential through data and AI, they’re lining up their visions. And they see we’re right there in the perfect place, the perfect time for them.

I was very specifically looking for–(is Snowflake) positioned well with customers?

What (are Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy and Chief Revenue Officer Mike Gannon) doing to change and evolve the company with partners in mind?

Kudos to my predecessor (former Snowflake Channel Chief Tyler Prince) and others. They established a really great platform to build from.

I was questioning whether this was just going to be another company that happened to have some partners or a partnering company. And I discerned (that Snowflake is) partner first, customer first.

And my interviews with Sridhar and Gannon were very telling. They shared with me that the channel partners are essential to scale. We have some pretty lofty goals.

Partners are our scale engine. Partners are how we’re going to make this happen.

The opportunity has never been better for partners.

What are some of your first projects with Snowflake?

We’re doing things that the outside world doesn’t know about.

We need to get the word out because I don’t think people know exactly what we do when it comes to–not just data engineering. We’re not just a data warehouse. We’re doing a lot more with analytics and AI and apps and collaboration. And there are so many cool developments.

One of the first things I did, I got together … a group of my trusted advisors from the usual suspects– Accenture, Deloitte and IBM, a few others.

And they say, ‘You have got to share more with us about your roadmap. Help us understand where you’re going. Give us advance notice so we can support it, be part of the launches.’

We know the partner and the channels and the alliances are our future, and it’s really how we’re going to take this collectively and achieve our vision of a world where data and AI turn possibilities into reality.

How does working at Snowflake compare to AWS?

I’m big on culture. I always was. It’s one of the things I loved about Amazon.

There are so many similarities (between Snowflake and Amazon’s cultures). Things like customer first … customer obsessed. Or we have partners that we align with who are client obsessed.

What are our customers’ needs when it comes to AI, data cloud and data analytics? And what are the outcomes that we want to help them drive? And what are the use cases and the solutions? We work backwards from there.

We have a part of the solution, we have a platform and we can collaborate with the ISVs (independent software vendors) and the consulting partners to create complete solutions and offerings that we bring to our customers maybe as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering or managed service. All of that stems from my team really taking this sales mindset.

There’s always opportunities to optimize and streamline and improve. And especially applying our own tools, our own analytics and our own AI to the business to become more efficient, to do more with less every single day and arm our PDMs (partner development managers) and our PSMs (partner success managers) and our reps with that.

The message is clear top down, from Sridhar, from Gannon, from others. We will partner.

(Snowflake reps) are all leaning in. They go, ‘I get it. In order to achieve the numbers, to serve my customers, partnering helps us.’ The deals happen faster. We build pipeline. We operate more efficiently. We get better relationships.

What’s your message to Snowflake partners as you get further into your new role?

We are looking to the future. We know the old adage–we’re all skating to where the puck is going.

First, I care first and foremost about (partners’) top line and your bottom line.

We want them to be profitable. They want a predictable business from us. They want consistency, they want scalability, and they want differentiation.

If we do what’s right for them with the customer in mind, our business will also rise with them. So we have got to keep that in mind.

Every partner we sit down with, we’re going to focus, probably, on industry geography, use cases, specific to their core competencies and advantages.

(Partners) can leverage what we offer (in the partner program) in ways to help them be differentiated. You look at things like–we have a consumption amplifier program which actually gets our sales reps accelerated consumption for new customers that we engage with with some of our DCP (Data Cloud Product partners) or ISV-type partners.

The co-sell program, where our reps can actually earn bookings and consumption attainment.

So we’re creating this teaming environment where our reps are aligned with the partners.

What should partners know about changes to Snowflake’s reseller program?

You have to have a balanced channel.

You need the GSIs and you need the big NSIs (national SIs) and the resellers and the distributors and the advisors like McKinsey and BCG.

When I was coming in, I got feedback from my trust adviser friends. … ‘Snowflake, it’s not as lucrative for us on the discounts.’

(Resellers told me), ‘We really want more frontend discount. We want it on the initial deal. We want to stay involved and, over time, drive consumption, even after the first deal. We want to be rewarded for doing that.’

That turns into profitability for them–and top line revenue.

We’ve reimagined (the reseller) program to streamline the customer’s path to success.

Now (partners are) motivated to not only help you beachhead and get new logos, but drive those through because there’s something in it for both of us. And it has just worked out great.

The goal is to stay ahead of accelerating the needs of our customers.

To do that, we need to ensure that our partner ecosystem is agile, they’re empowered and they’re aligned to our sales strategies. And the customers benefit from this more comprehensive strategy between Snowflake and our partners because the customers rely upon the partners. And they’ve been using these partners, in some cases, for decades.

The highest-performing resellers, they’re going to have certain attributes. They’re going to have really strong technical and business expertise. They can manage the current customer life cycle from procurement to deployment to the renewals. And this really ensures that our customers are getting the maximum value.

One of my jobs in my last life was to figure out–how do we translate products and services into solutions and offerings?

The partners are that secret decoder ring. They’re the ones that bring it all together.

We’re providing not just products, but a platform that they can resell. They can create offerings.

And you can put them back on our marketplace as another channel that will accelerate revenue and profitability.

Sept. 1 was the official launch.

It’s available to existing partners with resell agreements. It’s immediately eligible for them, as well as any new partners that join the Snowflake Partner Network.

We’re actively inviting customers, partners to sit down with us and have these conversations about the future. We want their input. We want to know what they’re thinking because the best idea is going to come from them, our customers and within our own company.

Do you want to see more partners in Snowflake’s ecosystem or is deepening relationships more important?

It is something that I think every company has questioned over the years.

Is it 700,000 (partners we should aim for in the ecosystem)? Probably not.

I don’t think that’s the right question. I think the question is, who are the right partners that can help us build a business working backwards from where we want to go.

What is the makeup (of an industry where Snowflake wants to grow, for example)? How much of that’s driven by partners? And then who are the right partners?

If we want (as an example, to grow more customers who are) chocolate manufacturers in Belgium, do we have the right partners who are experts in that part of the world, in that industry, who are trusted by customers and have the skills and capabilities and competencies which we absolutely need to develop?

It’s a hard question to answer. It’s more than 12,000 today. I can tell you that. Is it 100(000) or 200,000 (partners)? I don’t know.

What makes a great partner in the AI era?

The answer is going to change depending upon–are we talking about a GSI? GSI, we need to think globally. We have got to think about the multinational customers that we serve. And you need to develop the trained and capable resources in the right places around the world.

We need to be able to sit down at the right levels within these customers that are big global customers and understand where they are taking the company.

It’s not just, ‘Hey, I’d like to go experiment and maybe migrate my data.’ Why are you doing that? What is it you want to accomplish?

And so look at the GSIs. A lot of them have come from the advisory world, and they think that way. Then you look at some of the really good locals.

You take a phData. phData is one of the best of breed. They’re focusing on accelerating customer time-to-value to realize the art of the possible with AI by implementing Snowflake’s latest capabilities like Snowflake Intelligence and OpenFlow, like they’re really focused with us in specific areas, and they’re really good at what they do.

And then you take a Slalom. Not quite a GSI. They’re not quite a local. But they’re really good at industries, and they’re applying AI to disrupt those industries.

(The most successful Snowflake solution providers) are partnering with clients to build adaptive organizations that can take advantage of the constant AI revolution, including Snowflake’s product innovation.

They have C-level relationships who are interested in developing and leaning in hard with Snowflake to innovate with their customers.

They want to be loyal with us, meaning we get into a deal. Instead of just saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to just ride the fence with you’--no, we’re loyal to each other and we can team together.

We know we’re clicking fire on all cylinders when you don’t know who’s badged with what company. We’re all one team.

When we can get to that, we will be known not just as an iconic company.

We want people to go, how do I get to be the next Snowflake? Take that a step further.

How do other companies go, ‘How do I build a partner organization and programs like Snowflake did? I want to know what they did, and I want to get to where they’re getting.’