Vijayant Rai, a former executive director of Microsoft, has been named by data cloud firm Snowflake as its new managing director in India.

Rai replaces Vimal Venkatram, who moved to a regional position for Snowflake, based in Singapore.

According to reports, he will be in charge of spearheading Snowflake's go-to-market strategy and company expansion in India.

Prior to joining Snowflake, Rai led Microsoft India's banking and financial services sector as the country's executive director.

He had executive positions at Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, IBM, and other companies before this. The recently appointed physician has more than 27 years of expertise.

“I am excited to join Snowflake at this pivotal point. Snowflake recently announced a slew of new features, including Snowflake Cortex currently in private preview, that facilitate businesses with swift development of AI applications, further bolstering their commitment to driving innovation in the Indian market,” Rai said.

Among other responsibilities at Snowflake, Rai will lead company expansion throughout India, manage strategy, sales, and execution, and promote the use of Snowflake's data cloud across numerous sectors.

Founded in 2012, the firm is registered on the New York Stock Exchange and provides its platform to customers across sectors to enable various AI, ML, and analytics workloads as well as integrate siloed data, discover and securely exchange data, and power data applications.

Snowflake views India as a key market, having provided services to digital native companies there in the past, such as Byju's, Swiggy, Marico, Khatabook, Urban Company, and Cars24.