A company that has been in business for well over a century, and with operations spread across the globe, can truly collect a lot of data.

Such is the case for Exxon Mobil Corp., one of the world’s largest publicly held international oil and gas companies. The petroleum giant was interested in consolidating its extensive network of siloed data and modernizing its IT footprint.

“Exxon Mobil has been around for 130 years, [and] as a result we have a lot of data and a lot of legacy tools,” said Andrew Curry (pictured, left), information technology manager at Exxon Mobil. “We want to do a digital transformation, we really want to leverage that data as an asset. We realized we needed a central place … to start moving off our historical systems. The cloud was a logical place to go.”

Curry spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Tim Long (right), global head of manufacturing at Snowflake Inc., and they discussed how Snowflake works with Exxon Mobil and other global manufacturers to improve supply chain performance and leverage business data. (* Disclosure below.)

Rich manufacturing datasets

Exxon Mobil is among a number of major manufacturers to use pre-built solutions and industry datasets provided by Snowflake, whose offerings also include the Manufacturing Data Cloud. Launched earlier this year, the Manufacturing Data Cloud enables companies to build a data foundation, power smart manufacturing and improve supply chain performance.

“We’ve been working really hard to develop partnerships where we have rich datasets in Snowflake’s marketplace that have wisdom and insights into what’s happening in the supply chains around the world,” Long said. “We also bring in technology partners that have deep integrations to Snowflake that really leverage our strengths. They make it that much easier and faster for manufacturing customers to get data from enterprise systems, as well as the shop floor systems, and bring it all together in Snowflake.”

Along with a number of large global businesses, Exxon Mobil is taking a close look at how to leverage advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence to advance its mission. Snowflake’s ability to provide a foundation of data will be an important factor in this work, according to Curry.

“AI and machine learning, particularly with the emergence of generative and large language models, is truly going to be transformative,” Curry said. “The quality of your data becomes more and more important as you start leveraging these types of technologies. That foundation of data that we’ve been building, that we’re leveraging at Snowflake, is actually positioning us very well in the future to take advantage of some of the new AI and machine learning capabilities that are emerging.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE