Reltio Makes Enterprise Data Usable, and Then Uses It

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to Customer Data Platform vendors, or companies that looked like they might be. One that sits right on the border is Reltio, which fits the CDP criteria* but goes beyond customer data to all types of enterprise information. That puts it more in the realm of Master Data Management, except that MDM is highly technical while Reltio is designed to be used by marketers and other business people. You might call it “self-service MDM” but that’s an oxymoron right up there with “do-it-yourself brain surgery”.

Or not. Reltio avoids the traditional complexity of MDM in part by using the Cassandra data store, which is highly scalable and can more easily add new data types and attributes than standard relational databases. Reltio works with a simple data model – or graph schema if you prefer – that captures relationships among basic objects including people, organizations, products, and places. It can work with data from multiple sources, relying on partner vendors such as SnapLogic and MuleSoft for data acquisition and Tamr, Alteryx, and Trifacta for data preparation. It has its own matching algorithms to associate related data from different sources. As for the do-it-yourself bit: well, there’s certainly some technical expertise needed to set things up, but Reltio's services team generally does the hard parts for its clients. The point is that Reltio reduces the work involved – while adding a new source to a conventional data warehouse can easily take weeks or months, Reltio says it can add a new source to an existing installation in one day.

The result is a customer profile that contains pretty much any data the company can acquire. This is where the real fun begins, because that profile is now available for analysis and applications. These can also be done in Reltio itself, using built-in machine learning and data presentation tools to provide deep views into customers and accounts, including recommendations for products and messages. A simple app might take one or two months to build; a complicated app might take three or four months. The data is also available to external systems via real-time API calls.

Reltio is a cloud service, meaning the system doesn’t run on the client’s own computers. Pricing depends on the number of users and profiles managed but not the number of sources or data volume. The company was founded in 2011 and released its product several years later. Its clients are primarily large enterprises in retail, media, and life sciences.

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* marketer-controlled; multi-source unified persistent data; accessible to external systems