Build a modern customer data foundation with Segment and Databricks

In August, Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks, joined Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on stage for the Vision Keynote at our annual SIGNAL conference.  During that conversation, Ali joked that when teams build AI models they spend 80% of their time dealing with their data mess and 20% of their time complaining about their data mess - not leaving any time to actually build the models that serve their business.  That’s why hundreds of data teams use a CDP with their data lakehouse or data warehouse; to ensure their data is clean, aggregated in the right ways and that they have the right views to take action on their customer data.

Moreover, Segment and Databricks have a history of collaboration and co-innovation.  Earlier this year Databricks expanded their Delta Sharing ecosystem with new partners, including Twilio Segment, to seamlessly share data between our platforms, Apache Spark™, pandas, PowerBI, Excel and any other system that supports the open Delta Sharing protocol. 

Now, a key topic where Databricks and Segment are collaborating is around composing a CDP with the data lakehouse.  With so much data stored in data lakes and data warehouses, these data clouds have become an integral piece in forming complete, unified customer records.  As a result, many businesses want to create a CDP based on an architecture that uses open, interoperable, modular software composed of interchangeable building blocks and centered around their data lakehouse.

Building a composable CDP allows companies to choose the components of their data foundation. The four key components of a CDP include data activation, data unification into customer records, data compliance and governance, and data collection. In the CDP space, companies are now empowered to choose their own stack, selecting different applications for each of these roles, if desired.

While Segment offers all of these features in our platform, when companies work with Segment they benefit from true enterprise composability and gain the flexibility to choose Segment’s solutions as a package, or to build their own CDP stack using the Segment platform to connect homegrown tools and software from other vendors. 

This “best of both worlds” approach has helped over 27,000 companies worldwide save time and resources by not having to cobble together immature tools and maintain what amounts to a bespoke CDP, enabling them to concentrate on more strategic initiatives for their business.

Segment provides all of the components an organization needs to build a CDP with their Lakehouse, including:

• Storage Destination - Send event data from Segment to your Lakehouse

• Profiles Sync  - Send unified customer profiles to your Lakehouse where they can be enhanced with business critical data sets and AI models

• Reverse ETL - Activate data in your Lakehouse in your downstream tools of choice

• Protocols - Take control of your data quality with intuitive features and real-time validation built for enterprise scale

• Linked Profiles - Define a powerful Data Graph on the Lakehouse to create relationships between any business critical data set, such as customer events, experiences, buying groups, and the unified customer profile created by Segment.  [Sign up for the Beta]

To discuss this evolving landscape, Bryan Smith, the Technical Director for Retail & CPG at Databricks, will join the Segment team for a webinar on how to create a modern data foundation for any business around a customer data platform and a data lake.  The webinar will take place on November 7th and will be valuable to any team building out modern data foundation to power customer experience and accelerate the adoption of the latest AI technologies.

To join the webinar you can register now.