Snowflake’s newest industry cloud targets manufacturers

Snowflake Inc. today is rolling out its sixth industry-specific offering, this one targeting manufacturers.

The Manufacturing Data Cloud is aimed at supporting companies in the automotive, technology, energy and industrial sectors in addressing information silos within their organizations and collaborating more efficiently with partners, suppliers and customers.

Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in supply chains, Snowflake said the crisis also created a “massive opportunity to drive visibility into the supply chain and factory floor.” It intends the Manufacturing Data Cloud to be a single, fully managed, secure platform for multicloud data consolidation with unified governance and nearly limitless scalability.

Improved visibility

The platform’s inherent data-sharing features can improve visibility across an organization’s supply chain by enabling its own data to be joined with that from third-party partners and data housed in the Snowflake Marketplace. The company’s Snowpark development tool can then be used to build machine learning models in the Python, Java and Scala languages for uses such as demand forecasting and supply chain management.

Snowflake said its native support for semistructured, structured and unstructured data can also be used within manufacturing plants to capture shop floor data and streamline manufacturing operations.

Snowflake’s announcement comes just nine days after rival Databricks Inc. introduced a version of its lakehouse data repository oriented toward manufacturers. Both companies have been racing to orient their offerings to specific vertical industries as a way to recruit partners and target pockets of growth in an uncertain economy.

Partner-led

Relatively little about the offering is net new from Snowflake. “The Manufacturing Data Cloud is built on Snow’s already announced capabilities,” said Tim Long, the company’s global head of manufacturing. Rather, the rollout is an opportunity for Snowflake to highlight what some existing manufacturing customers are doing with the platform and recruit new customers in the fold.

“We are activating our partner network solutions for Snowflake and bringing them to launch through post-launch activations with webinars and custom presentations for manufacturing customers,” Long said.

There will be some new products and upgrades from within the company’s partner network. Riveron Consulting LP plans to release software that “brings data directly from the shop floor to Snowflake in a fully edge-driven architecture,” Long said. “It will leverage Snowflake’s strengths to scale as needed as well as model the 13 different data types that are part of the Smart Plug messaging format for the industrial internet of things.”

Ernst & Young Global Ltd. will also upgrade its Spend Insights software to include a machine-learning model that matches material names against approved lists for enterprise-wide reporting. Vertex Systems Oy will have new software for laser-guided troubleshooting on the shop floor that ingests streaming data from factory equipment to create visualizations in Snowflake.

Manufacturing has emerged as a prime vertical market for Snowflake thanks to post-pandemic investments in supply chain resiliency and efforts to jumpstart the U.S. manufacturing sector, Long said. “We’ve also seen our partners lean into” manufacturing scenarios, he added. “We also know from industry research that there’s considerable investment being made in supply chain resiliency and smart manufacturing.”

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