ICON 2023
You might have noticed we have been madly enjoying ourselves in Vegas for the past week. The reason for this was that we have been at the Blue Yonder ICON 2023 Conference. And because we like to think of ourselves as the Supply Chain Party, the Starware team rocked a few parties with our cool customers and all the great associates of Blue Yonder. We made a short compilation of our adventures in Vegas for all of you to enjoy.
Next to all this entertainment, there was some exciting news to learn at Icon as well:
This was the first time we could hear the vision of the new Blue Yonder Management Team, first-hand. It turns out they are building a RocketShip! If there is something we get enthusiastic about at Starware it is SCI-FI stuff, so I’m sure you can imagine our excitement 😉 We had the opportunity to take a good look under the hood of this RocketShip and got a chance to kick the tires a bit. We even discovered that the RocketShip had a quite sizeable bar and dance club hidden inside to host a decent party or two 😉
Obviously, this is just a metaphor, but the ambitions are nothing less than building a RocketShip.
The Rocketship
Sorry about the next section which is heavily loaded with tech terms, but as techies ourselves we are just too excited to not talk about it 😉
It turns out that Blue Yonder is planning to build the Supply Chain Operating System!
They are doing so by centralizing all of their applications to a central data cloud. Snowflake is the name of the software company that is taking the industry by storm and is the first company that successfully has combined the merits of traditional SQL databases and big data – databases. Creating the promise of a data lake in which you can perform direct transactions and build native apps upon. Imagine a place where the massive data that surrounds the supply chain only lives in one, instead of being pumped around from partner to partner, and can be securely and deliberately shared. The impact on CO2 reduction alone, by reducing so many computing hours alone, is mind-boggling!
The first step is to create truly integrated microservices of all the different great applications of the Blue Yonder portfolio. These services will be running on the Luminate Platform hosted on Microsoft Azure, enabling end-to-end supply chain software that fits you as a client. This is the first step in moving away from several siloed applications that you would have to integrate and connect first with each other.
The Supply Chain Party
This future is exactly in line with where we want to grow as Starware, we want to expand our services over the entire supply chain for our customers. What better way to do that in a unified technology stack?
So we already booked our tickets for the maiden flight of the rocket ship, and we are very curious to see where it will be able to take us next!