Snowflake has appointed industry veteran Chris Niederman as Senior Vice President of its Alliances & Channels business effective July 21, 2025.
In this role, Niederman, who comes with 30 years of partner and GTM experience, will lead Snowflake’s global and partner system, the company indicated in a July 10 statement. He will also be responsible for driving the firm’s growth and partnerships through Snowflake AI Data Cloud, helping customers achieve their full potential through data and AI.
Commenting on the appointment, Mike Gannon, Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake said: “Chris’s unparalleled experience pioneering partner-led growth for major industry players is a game-changer. I’m incredibly excited to aggressively scale Snowflake’s business via this ecosystem, and thrilled Chris’s leadership will propel our alliances and channels program to its next phase of exponential growth.”
Niederman most recently served as Managing Director of the AWS Industries and Solutions team at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he led the organization responsible for AWS’s worldwide partner strategy and industry transformation initiatives. He spent 11 years at AWS where he also built the Global Systems Integrators business from inception to a $10 billion annual run rate. He has also held partner sales positions at VMWare.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Snowflake is rapidly expanding its partner network. According to the company, Snowflake’s partner network consists of more than 12,000 global partners. It includes cloud providers, systems integrators and technology innovators. This network helps organizations to maximize the value of Snowflake AI Data Cloud which offers diverse integrated solutions, expert services and industry-specific solutions to its customers. For ERP professionals, this announcement solidifies the fact that the pressure to integrate with external data platforms for advanced AI and analytics is an accelerating strategic priority for companies like Snowflake.
The cost versus capability debate is gaining momentum. ERP professionals are now faced with a fork in the road. Should they continue with centralized data and analytics within their ERP ecosystem or do they want to pursue platform-agnostic data integration like the one offered by Snowflake? To get the answer, ERP professionals must be prepared to lead the discussion on the pros, cons, and cost of keeping their data within their enterprise ecosystem like SAP versus leveraging a platform-agnostic integration like the one offered by Snowflake. It all starts with evaluating the maturity of connectors and data-sharing capabilities between a specific ERP solution and the wider AI Data Cloud ecosystem.
The path to meaningful AI in the enterprise is about the ecosystem. The most valuable AI applications, like optimizing a supply chain with countless external variables, require a collaborative effort. This involves the core ERP, a powerful data platform like Snowflake, and specialized application partners. Snowflake’s amplified focus on alliances is a clear sign that it is formalizing these teams to solve specific, high-value business problems. ERP professionals planning their AI-driven initiatives must therefore ask which system integrators and software vendors in the industry are building powerful, pre-integrated solutions on platforms like Snowflake. That’s because, the success of the next major project won’t hinge on a single piece of tech, but on how well this multi-partner ecosystem collaborates.
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