Additional reporting by Stephanie Ball, deputy editor, ERP Today.
Snowflake has named Sridhar Ramaswamy as the company’s new chief executive officer and member of the Board of Directors, alongside announcing its Q4 and FY2024 results.
Transitioning from his previously held position as senior vice president of AI at Snowflake, Ramaswamy’s immediate appointment is to signal further generative AI innovation for the company.
The appointment marks his progression from co-founder of Neeva, the Snowflake-acquired, first private AI-powered search engine company, to CEO of Snowflake.
Frank Slootman will move from the CEO role to continue to serve as chairman of the board.
Commenting on Ramaswamy’s promotion, Slootman said: “As the leading cloud data platform, Snowflake is at the epicenter of the AI revolution. There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning.
“He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses. I have the utmost confidence in Sridhar and look forward to working with him as he assumes this new role.”
Ramaswamy joined Snowflake in May 2023, bringing his experience of leading Google’s advertising products. During his 15 years at Google, he was an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5bn to over $100bn.
Previously speaking to ERP Today about his experience at Google, Ramaswamy, said: “I was an accidental and early Google employee. Accidental as in, I didn’t really think of it as a big deal. And I went to work in the ads team that it turned out to be one of the best money-making ventures of all time.
“Even for Google it was unexpected, I can assure you. I remember that Schmidt asked me and a few others to write a $100bn revenue plan, this was in 2008. The concept that a company could make $100bn in revenue was just preposterous and yet in 2018, I ran the team that made $100bn in revenue.”
Since joining Snowflake in May 2023, following the company’s acquisition of Neeva, Ramaswamy has been spearheading Snowflake’s AI strategy. He led the launch of Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s new fully managed service that makes AI simple and secure for users to drive business value. Before joining Snowflake, Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019.
Commenting on his appointment, Ramaswamy said: “In the last 12 years, Frank and the entire team have established Snowflake as the leading cloud data platform that is providing enterprises with the secure, scalable and cost-effective data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks they need to build for the future.
“I am honored to have been chosen to lead the company into this next chapter of growth. We have an enormous opportunity ahead to help all customers leverage AI to deliver massive business value. My focus will be on accelerating our ability to bring innovation to our customers and partners.”
The new appointment was announced alongside Snowflake’s financial results for its fourth quarter and full-year fiscal 2024, which exceeded analysts’ estimates with a 32 percent revenue growth year on year (YoY) to $774.7m in Q4.
The strong results for the quarter that ended January 31, 2024, were spurred by the company’s 461 customers with trailing 12-month product revenue greater than $1m and 691 Forbes Global 2000 customers, representing 39 percent and eight percent YoY growth, respectively.
