Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud bets on accelerating cloud efficiency

Snowflake is making another industry-specific product available in the form of managed Telecom Data Cloud, nearly a year after launching Retail Data Cloud and the Healthcare and Life Sciences Data Cloud offering.

With Snowflake’s proprietary cloud data warehouse at its heart, the Telecom Data Cloud combines Snowflake’s 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 Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, SDG Group, Prodapt Consulting, and Wipro. 

The Telecom Data Cloud, which is designed to accelerate cloud deployments, also has partnerships with several other technology firms including Alteryx, CARTO, H2O.AI, Informatica, and ThoughtSpot.

Different partners bring in different capabilities to the Telecom Data Cloud. Snowflake partner Flywheel, for instance, enables live access to third-party data sources including satellite, geospatial, and customer demographic data to build out new products or applications.

The new offering comes with prebuilt templates to build industry-focused solutions, the company said. 

The acceleration of cloud computing deployments is expected to help telecommunications service providers boost their digital transformation efforts by enabling superior customer experiences, maximising operational efficiency, and monetising new data services.

With the Telecom Data Cloud, Snowflake now has a portfolio of five industry-specific versions of its Data Cloud.

Industry clouds target accelerating cloud deployments

While vertical-specific industry solutions are nothing new for software vendors, cloud-enablement for legacy enterprises via industry clouds brings deployment agility and networking and collaborative advantages that are not there when deploying conventional solutions on-premises, said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“The common appeal of industry solutions has always been accelerating deployments with expertise and pre-built content geared to a specific industry and its common use cases,” Henschen explained.

For data platform providers, such as Snowflake, this would mean providing industry data models, connectors to common applications and data sources, and knowledge of frequent integrations and query patterns that support common use cases, Henschen said.

“The cloudification of vertical solutions adds the element of bringing in data providers for enrichment, and the opportunity to share and monetise data as cloud services,” Henschen said.  

The Telecom Data Cloud, according to the analyst, will aid SQL-centric data engineers and analysts, by accelerating deployments with pre-built content geared to a specific industry and its common use cases.