Snowflake Computing drifts into Oz with new offices, execs

Snowflake Computing has announced two senior executive appointments to enable the market acceleration of the company's cloud-built data warehouse solution across the Asia Pacific region.

In addition, the company has opened Sydney and Melbourne offices to support its customer and partner growth in Australia and New Zealand.

Peter O'Connor has been appointed as vice president of sales for Asia Pacific.

Based in Sydney, O'Connor has more than 20 years of sales, partner and regional business development experience and will lead the management and expansion of Snowflake's Asia Pacific business.

O'Connor was previously Asia Pacific vice president for Nimble Storage where he drove and oversaw revenue growth, customer acquisition and partner enablement.

Prior to Nimble Storage, he was vice president and managing director at NetApp Australia and Asia Pacific vice president for Macromedia.

Snowflake has also appointed Alan Eldridge as Asia Pacific director of sales engineering based in Melbourne with responsibility for leading the company's regional pre-sales team.  

Eldridge has worked in the data analytics space for almost two decades and joins Snowflake following six years at Tableau Software, where he was the company's first employee in the region and most recently was Tableau's presales manager for Australia and New Zealand.

Prior to Tableau, he held a variety of technical sales roles at Microsoft, Business Objects and Sun Microsystems.

"The combined experience which Peter and Alan bring to Snowflake in the Asia Pacific region will be crucial to accelerating our market presence in the data sharing economy," Snowflake chief revenue officer Chris Degnan says.

"Their knowledge of deploying successful, go-to-market strategies and providing customers with the solutions and support they need, will enable organisations to gain all the insight from all their data in order to become data-driven enterprises.

Last month, Snowflake announced its latest round of growth funding of US$263 million led by ICONIQ Capital, Altimeter Capital and newcomer Sequoia Capital.

With this round of funding, Snowflake's pre-money valuation is US$1.5 billion. Since its founding in 2012, Snowflake has raised a total of US$473 million in growth funding.

In the past year, Snowflake has grown its customer base by 300 percent and has increased customer data stored in Snowflake fourfold.