Data cloud for supply chain: Blue Yonder and Snowflake’s innovation – SiliconANGLE

Since supply chains are accustomed to a siloed data environment, running them in a coordinated way is an uphill task, and this is why a data cloud for supply chain is needed. 

Through a unified platform and data cloud, Blue Yonder Inc. offers interoperable and resilient supply chain solutions through end-to-end connectivity with the help of Snowflake Inc. because the presence of data silos in supply chain triggers inefficiency based on increased latency and batch, according to Duncan Angove (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Blue Yonder. 

“The answer to resiliency is not inventory, it’s software, but not the software we traditionally had where it’s these different silos that don’t allow you to operate in a coordinated way across departments and across enterprises,” Angove said. “That’s where the data cloud is so powerful. All your data in one place, one version of the truth across the enterprise. You’re moving applications to the data and it allows you to operate at a speed that was unprecedented before this technology came along.”

Angove and Tyler Prince (left), senior vice president of worldwide alliances and channels at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Dave Vellante at Data Cloud Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why data cloud for supply chain is a game-changer and how Blue Yonder and Snowflake make it a reality (* Disclosure below.)

Data cloud for supply chain as an innovation shockwave

Since supply chain is batch oriented and experiences diverse application topology, it becomes a hard data problem, making data cloud for supply chain important. As a result, Blue Yonder makes this a reality thanks to Snowflake’s event-driven architecture, Angove pointed out. 

“One of the things that has plagued supply chain software is it’s batch oriented,” he noted. “It’s always been done in batch because you haven’t had an architecture like you get with a data cloud where you have access to elastic compute and technicalities around zero-copy cloning and separating storage from compute. What Snowflake allows us to do is inject speed in that OODA loop, get rid of batch, get rid of the hourglass, deploy infinite compute.”

Based on Snowflake’s ability to process, manage and govern huge amounts of data, it’s changing the game in supply chain. As a result, the Snowflake-Blue Yonder partnership helps tackle supply chain challenges, enabling enterprises to optimize their objectives, according to Prince.

“It’s a massive problem and a massive opportunity, but it’s also dependent on a tremendous amount of data,” he pointed out. “I think that’s why these innovative companies can focus on what their core business is … it allows them to focus on those core competencies and leverage the innovation that we’re driving in the world of data and AI. 

Given that supply chains are about relationships, Blue Yonder uses artificial intelligence to make them perfectly oriented. This is made possible through the deployment of knowledge graphs and agents that augment end users’ capabilities, according to Angove. 

“Every day on Snowflake, Blue Yonder runs 10 billion machine learning workloads,” he stated. “It’s applied AI at scale and it’s authentic. We use relational AI as our semantic layer, the knowledge graph that sits on. That gives us really, really strong AI capabilities, because for language models and agents, it brings context and semantic meaning to the underlying data.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Data Cloud Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Snowflake Inc. and Blue Yonder Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Snowflake, Blue Yonder nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE