Reltio: From Origin Story to Future State

Reltio Founder and CTO, Manish Sood, recently attended the AWS re:Invent 2021 conference in Las Vegas where he spent time with editors of TheCUBE.net. The following includes key takeaways from that discussion, including a history of the company and what the future holds.

You can watch the segment here: https://youtu.be/h2568RlvHlg

Reltio’s Origins
Manish has spent much of his career trying to solve a problem that most large companies have – getting all their applications on the same page to generate reliable and trustworthy data that can fuel their business. He worked on the data problem at Siperian for several years, where he focused on unifying data across platforms for customers in several industries. When Informatica acquired Siperian in 2010, Manish left to pursue a startup venture that would solve some of these thorny problems – but instead through a unified, cloud-based solution. He believed the cloud would become the ideal environment for unifying data across multiple platforms. With a passion for innovation and a strong belief in the concept, he invested his personal savings and incorporated Reltio in 2011. A decade later, the company is valued at over $1.7 billion and continues to rapidly grow.

The Opportunity Continues to Expand
There has been an explosion of SaaS applications, with nearly every business process now having at least one application. Reltio itself runs on over 100 SaaS applications end-to-end, so we’re no stranger to complex data stacks. Large companies now routinely use anywhere from 300-500 or more applications, compared to just a dozen or so only a decade ago. With COVID-19 accelerating digital transformation in nearly every industry, we’ve seen companies adopt technology at a much faster rate than expected, creating hypergrowth in data and a tremendous need for corralling it. Data will only grow further as the SaaS industry generates novel solutions and applications for businesses to run more efficiently.

Data Value Acceleration
The expanding and siloed data set creates one of the most significant friction points for any company – how to pull it all together in a unified way and then put it to use. Manish understood this opportunity from the start. To create better, more efficient business outcomes, companies need to have a single source of trusted information from their collected data silos. By pulling all of a company’s data together, it can get more value out of it. With a constant supply of clean, compliant, and comprehensive data, companies can get a much clearer picture of their customer and operations and a greater ability to enhance them.

To get the full potential out of data and transform it from a roadblock into a growth accelerator, businesses need to unify it across an entire ecosystem quickly. When beginning to solve this problem, Manish realized that digital transformation and cloud transformation requirements would drive a larger and growing need for this single source of truth. That’s why we refer to Reltio as a data value accelerator. Reltio and its products unify siloed data across hundreds of platforms that transform data into a vital business resource that works in real-time.

Reltio’s First Customers Providing Life Sciences Data Solutions
Reltio’s customer base was primarily in the pharmaceutical industry out of the gate. From the beginning, Manish learned that life science organizations ran on information about people, organizations, products, and locations. Collecting and analyzing data through a single application could help customers thrive and become more efficient.

Life science was the perfect starting point for Reltio, as the industry has enormous amounts of disparate data ranging from life sciences, consumer sales, and clinical trials, among others. Since all of this data comes from multiple sources, it was ideal for Reltio to prove its end-to-end multi-domain capabilities. Reltio then expanded to other verticals with similar patterns and needs, such as healthcare, financial services, retail, high tech, travel, and hospitality, among others.

Reltio’s Future Plans
Reltio’s value has grown as more companies have sought solutions from us to help solve some of the most vexing problems around data management. Valued at $1.7 billion, after a recent funding round of $120 million, Reltio has been careful throughout its journey to act as careful stewards of investment capital. Reltio plans to continue building the business with a long-term mindset while seeking the “Rule of 40” or striving for a growth rate plus profit margin that is 40% or higher. One of the most critical areas of growth opportunity for Reltio will be in global markets. As a gold standard, Reltio will continue to improve how we invest in our products and consider what other capabilities we can expand on and enhance. Data should be the accelerant to a business, not something that holds it back. Reltio can help achieve this by making data readily available, accessible, and usable for all customers.