Dive Brief:
- Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehousing and analytics company, is leaning on its new supply chain solution for manufacturing to drive revenue growth this year, according to CEO Frank Slootman.
- "Supply chain management is one of the few remaining realms in enterprise software that has struggled to platform itself," said Slootman, speaking last week during a quarterly earnings call for the three-month period ending April 30. "It's an email and spreadsheet operation, it's incredibly inefficient and it's an incredibly high-volume opportunity."
- Snowflake’s manufacturing data cloud platform launched in April. The supply chain solution can also be deployed as an operational hub for large enterprises and institutions, according to Slootman.
Dive Insight:
Hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud are banking on industry verticals to unlock new revenue streams.
As the market matures and enterprises look for ways to optimize cloud spend, industry clouds remove migration barriers for organizations in finance, insurance, retail, manufacturing and the public sector.
Secondary cloud service providers like Snowflake are following suit, tailoring platforms to the contours of specific industries.
Customers from the financial services sector accounted for nearly one-quarter of Snowflake’s revenue despite the squeeze cloud optimization put on data consumption, CFO Michael Scarpelli said during the earnings call.
Creating a standardized data solution for highly variable operations with sufficient visibility across the numerous entities in a manufacturing supply chain was the challenge, said Slootman.
Data science, machine learning and AI were also growth areas in Q1, with more than 1,500 customers running these types of workloads, up 91% year over year, Slootman said.
The company is focused on growing its AI base among a broad spectrum of users, including analysts and programmers.
“For analysts we have introduced in preview ML-powered SQL extensions, such as anomaly detection, top insights and time series forecasting,” Slootman said. The new features give SQL-proficient users access to data science models.
Snowflake saw quarterly revenue grow 48% year-over-year, down from 85% in the same period last year. Operating income losses increased to $273.2 million, up from $188.8 million in the same quarter last year.
