Snowflake Computing snaps up Guy Baldwin as it bolsters APJ channel team

Snowflake Computing has hired Sydney-based Guy Baldwin as its director for Alliances and Channels for the Asia Pacific and Japan region.

As part of his new role at Snowflake, Baldwin will support the acceleration of the company's alliance and channel momentum across Asia Pacific and Japan.

"Partners play a critical role in supporting our mission to help organisations to easily store, integrate analyse and share varying data types in the cloud," says Snowflake's vice president of Sales for Asia Pacific, Peter O'Connor.

"Guy will help the regional Snowflake team address the surge in demand for our data-warehouse-as-a-service across the APJ region by enabling partners to provide customers with a holistic data analytics platform as well as complementary and industry-leading products and services.

Baldwin was previously director of Global Alliances at MapR Data Technologies, where he led recruitment and development of both global and specialist consulting firms, systems integrators, and both technology and cloud service providers.

Baldwin also developed MapR's regional programs for independent software vendors and value-added resellers. He has also worked in several senior alliance channel and sales management positions at VMware's Cloud Application Division.

Snowflake is currently enabling and certifying data practitioners from leading regional and global systems integrators, and also participated for the first time at the AWS Summit in Sydney.

Peter O'Connor is also relatively new to the Snowflake team, after joining the company in March. He has a background as Asia Pacific vice president for Nimble Storage, and he has held other positions at NetApp Australia, as well as Macromedia.

The company also opened offices in Melbourne and Sydney to support growth across Australia and New Zealand in February.

It has also raised growth funding of US$263 million, bringing the company's entire growth funding pool to US$473 million. The company's pre-money valuation is worth US$1.5 billion.

Last year the launch of Snowflake's Australian cloud data warehouse demonstrated the company's plans to claim a major stake in the cloud market.

"By providing an Australian deployment, Snowflake enables customers with Australian data to keep that information close to home. They now have more control over their data and how they comply with Australian data protection regulations," said Bob Muglia, Snowflake's CEO.