Highlights –
- The new product will help retailers know the predictions related to customer’s purchases and will help in illustrating it better.
- The product claims to have several efficiencies such as data sharing, data enrichment, and data-monetization driving more profit and sales, without hampering privacy.
Just a week after launching the Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud Platform, Snowflake announced the release of a Retail Data Cloud aimed at helping retail and consumer good companies get the most out of their data.
With proprietary cloud data warehouse forming the core of the company, 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 way consumers, retailers, and brands interact is quickly changing, and the data that organizations need to understand and adapt is not as available or easy to work with as it needs to be. Whether a business is working to deliver more personalized purchase experiences or adjusting amid supply chain, shortage, or inflation challenges – among others – the needed data is spread across internal and external stakeholders,” said Rosemary Hua, Snowflake’s GTM lead for retail and CPG industries.
How will Retail Data Cloud help?
The new Retail Data Cloud solves this issue by bringing industry-specific datasets and various partner solutions on a single platform. With this, it fuels collaboration across the industry, allowing all stakeholders access to their data and new information from other external sources.
“Our new Retail Data Cloud breaks down data silos within and across organizations and offers retail organizations specific AI and analytics tools they need to make quick, insight-driven decisions to overcome obstacles and adapt to trends across functions – from manufacturing to logistics, marketing, merchandising and beyond. In short, regardless of where precisely in the retail ecosystem an organization lives, we’re making more data more available and easier to work with so they can optimize every part of their business,” Hua said.
Snowflake noted that businesses using the Retail Data Cloud will be able to share data across verticals and major public cloud platforms in real-time. To facilitate strict data governance and regulatory compliance, the firm implements a portfolio of easily managed security capabilities, including data clean rooms, double-blind joins, restricted queries, centralized RBAC (role-based access control) and row/columnar level obfuscation.
The Retail Data Cloud will include prebuilt data applications from various consulting partners and technology. For example, a Retail Intelligence dashboard is built with partner Tableau to help the retailers insert their data within the app and automatically gain insights on pre-optimized working and the hiring pattern.
With the inclusion of Retail Data Cloud, Snowflake will now offer four industry-specific versions of its platform. This year, there were two launches, while Financial Services Data Cloud and Media Data Cloud were introduced last year.
Snowflake is not the first vendor to offer Retail Data Cloud. Competition is very much there. Data management vendor Databricks launched the first industry-specific Data Lakehouse for Retail and Consumer Good Customers in January this year.
Experts’ view
“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.
“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.
