The Open Data Initiative: Why Reltio is All-in
The Open Data Initiative partnership between Adobe, Microsoft, SAP solidifies plans for the tech giants to create a single data model for consumer data that is portable between platforms. Meanwhile, Salesforce announced Customer 360 at Dreamforce 18, with the intention of helping brands identify who their customers are and how they previously interacted with them. The single customer 360 ID will enable companies to access customer information through Salesforce’s various applications including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud.
The announcement is great news for the industry, and I’m excited that Reltio will be supporting both initiatives. This means that our customers, who are already in production using Reltio Cloud for Customer 360, as well as any future customers and partners, will be able to use Reltio to take full advantage, as both initiatives evolve while benefiting from significant additional capabilities.
The Open Data Initiative and Customer 360: Customers At the Heart of Business
Standardizing on a common data model, and having a single Customer 360 ID is important, but such efforts have historically been limiting. Common IDs and tight coupling of apps can solve some immediate problems, could provide a quick fix for small organizations but in the long run, can create new islands of data that can create challenges for larger enterprises.
Reltio will help both the Open Data Initiative and Customer 360 by continuously unifying and organizing all data within their respective models while making it universally accessible for collaboration and consumption across the enterprise.
Our philosophy has always been that standalone customer profile data reconciliation is insufficient without the benefit of understanding relationships across more than just the customer domain. Unlocking the value in relationships across multiple domains such as customers, households, stores, locations, products, parts, suppliers is essential to a true Customer 360, and Reltio delivers this at an enterprise scale.
Customer Trust Requires Being Trustworthy With Data
The Open Data Initiative announcement mentions a data model with over 50 different open source schemas stored in a data lake. These schemas require companies to stitch together the relationships across attributes, schemas, and profiles. Reltio helps this effort through logical metadata that combines all 50+ schemas into one unified canonical model and view of the customer data while ensuring continuous data quality that prevents a traditional data lake from turning into a data swamp.
We started Reltio on the idea that customer data will always be distributed across dozens of application sources with different formats; that companies will keep on adding new sources; that understanding relationships across all data types, not just customer profiles are important; that agility is key, and that future-proofing from changes in technology investments is critical.
It’s the reason why we adopted a multi-cloud, multi-model data storage architecture, rather than an arguably easier approach of committing to a single NoSQL, RDBMS, or a graph database.
For over seven years, we’ve been delivering on the promise of the complete customer 360-view, through a foundation of trusted, reliable data, powered by open, next-generation modern Master Data management (MDM). We’ve delivered this by not just creating a better MDM in the cloud, but creating a true 360-view that includes master data, relationships across all data entities and correlating omnichannel interactions, transactions.
But we didn’t stop there.
We architected a platform that brings together analytical insight and operational execution using advanced analytics and machine learning to continuously correlate insight, action, and outcomes in a closed-loop, to extract the maximum business value out of data.
Landscapes Shift, But Our Promise Does Not
Our customers – which include eight of the 10 largest life science companies, two of the top 10 cosmetics companies in the world, a global hotel and hospitality group, a U.S.-based healthcare insurer, one of the largest U.S.-based pet retailers, one of the largest mortgage providers – rely on Reltio for their digital transformation and customer engagement initiatives.
From globally harmonizing customer 360-views across 140+ countries to bring together customer data from hundreds of millions of organizations, to real-time personalization, marketing segmentation of millions of consumers, Reltio continues to deliver on the promise of Customer 360 and The Open Data Initiative.
Speed, performance, and scalability are key. Over 4.3 billion mission critical master profiles, representing well over 1 Petabyte of storage under management in Reltio Cloud, is being accessed by business teams globally to the tune of over 85 million real-time API calls per day. As these numbers are growing by the second, our multi-cloud platform supported on both AWS and GCP provides the elastic and scalable horsepower to meet demanding workloads, and the aggressive growth objectives of global enterprises. They look to their “Reltioed” data as the trusted source for their analytics and machine learning (ML) initiatives, compliance requirements such as GDPR, and next-generation customer engagement and experiences.
Reltio partners, including Salesforce, Mulesoft, IQVIA, AWS, GCP, Accenture, Cognizant, Wipro, ZS Associates, and Dun & Bradstreet, have all been part of successful Reltio for Customer 360 deployments, which bring together data across applications and sources in multiple Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP environments.
These are exciting times for enterprises looking to transform themselves and leapfrog the competition. But it’s not easy, with a shifting landscape of technology choices, continuously evolving regulations such as GDPR, CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and the need to operate at scale most cost-effectively.
To companies considering how the Salesforce and Open Data Initiative announcements might impact their plans, please reach out to us to learn more about our support of both initiatives, and how we can get you on a path to future-proofed Customer 360 in a matter of weeks. To our current customers who have placed their faith, and most importantly their critical customer data assets into Reltio, I’d like to say thank you, and assure you that the best is yet to come.
