Snowflake launches Retail Data Cloud

After launching the Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud Platform just a week ago, Snowflake has announced a Retail Data Cloud aimed at helping retail and consumer goods companies make the most of their data.

With Snowflake’s proprietary cloud data warehouse at its heart, the Retail Data Cloud brings together Snowflake’s highly-scalable data warehousing, analytics and compliance tools, with access to third-party data sources and resources through a data marketplace, and various partner consulting services from the likes of Capgemini and Infosys.

The Retail Data Cloud will also include prebuilt data applications from various technology and consulting partners. For example, a Retail Intelligence dashboard has been built with partner Tableau to help retailers plug in their data and automatically gain insights into pre-optimized working and hiring patterns. Or, customers looking to apply machine learning to their data can turn to partners such as Amazon Web Services, Dataiku or DataRobot for faster time-to-market.

“The retail industry has seen some disruptions of late due to the pandemic and ongoing geopolitical crises,” Rosemary Hua, global head of industry go-to-market for retail and consumer goods at Snowflake said. “These problems are a result of enterprises being unable to predict how customers are reacting to the changing circumstances.”

Snowflake now offers four industry-specific versions of its platform, with the two launches this year joining the Financial Services Data Cloud and Media Data Cloud, that were both introduced last year.

“Data brings visibility and efficiency-driving insight to all stakeholders in retail,” Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research said in response to the announcement.

Henschen sees your average retail customer taking a phased approach to adopting these various capabilities, starting with data management and analytics, before investigating the prebuilt, industry-specific capabilities from partners.

“Even further up the ladder are data-sharing, data-enrichment and, potentially, data-monetization opportunities that might drive yet more efficiency, sales, and profit opportunities for all constituents, while, of course, respecting compliance and privacy safeguards,” he added.

Snowflake won’t have it all its own way in this market however, as rival data management vendor Databricks launched its first industry-specific Data Lakehouse for Retail and Consumer Goods Customers back in January.