ETL-as-a-Service is a great idea, particularly one that is visualization/analytics-tool-agnostic! However, there are so many data sources, and they all require different integrations with their different APIs or export mechanisms. A service isn't really useful unless it can import the lion's share of services that a given company uses...
Eh, you'd be surprised how much value a company can get just by marrying a few data sources (e.g., marketing automation + google analytics + CRM).
Doing this right now manually piping data into PostgreSQL via Heroku and using Chartio to visualize and query.
Actually, we don't have any interest in being a visualization tool, and are super focused on building customer data infrastructure of the future. This product release is in close partnership with our BI partners (Looker, Mode, Wagon, Periscope, BIME and Chartio). One of the biggest problems our mutual customers face is getting data into their warehouse so that they can use the BI tool in the first place. This launch…
Can someone use Segment to generate per-user reporting data? So, instead of Total Company Sales this Month, I want Bob's Sales, Joe's Sales, etc. It feels like this is just a filter on top of what you already have. Almost like a parameterized query? (pass in @UserId for a where statement) I originally thought maybe this is the job for one of your visualization partners but you really need to filter the results before…
That's kind of a broad question, but in theory, for sure. Once you've got the raw data in your own warehouse, you can roll up at any level of specificity. So that could be per salesperson, per product, per date, per office, whatever. The key is first getting the raw data out of the vendors' control and into your own warehouse.
I wonder if this makes BI companies freak out a little bit -- because pushing this data into redshift and adding a visualization layer on top takes care of most smaller scale BI needs...
As somebody who works on a data exploration platform (Looker I can't tell you how many potential customers are crazily excited about the idea of centralizing the data that all their apps produce into one central warehouse and putting Looker on top of that, but are stymied by the middle step of actually getting the data OUT of the vendors' APIs and IN to their own warehouse. Being able to point them to an off-the-shelf solution for that problem is a big win for us.
I wonder if this makes BI companies freak out a little bit -- because pushing this data into redshift and adding a visualization layer on top takes care of most smaller scale BI needs...
From a BI consultancy perspective, not in the slightest. The amount of time we spend on ETL is not because of the difficulty of piping data around from place-to-place. The difficulty is in modelling data appropriately to support ad-hoc analyses. Rather, the E and L portions don't provide much difficulty (hassle, frustration, sometimes time, sure, but they're not inherently difficult). The T, transformation, is huge i…
Agree that it's only one part of the data lifecycle, but if you don't have your own team of engineers to build all those connectors, you can't even get to the point of being able to transform your data.
We at Looker (disclosure: work there), are totally focused on making the transformations fast, flexible and powerful. But without the data to transform, there's nothing we can do to help customers. So we're super psyched that Segment is stepping in to fill this void and get the E and L done, so we can T.
ETL-as-a-Service is a great idea, particularly one that is visualization/analytics-tool-agnostic! However, there are so many data sources, and they all require different integrations with their different APIs or export mechanisms. A service isn't really useful unless it can import the lion's share of services that a given company uses...
Agreed. I don't use any of those services. Seems the product integrations limits the customer pool quite a bit
Actually, we don't have any interest in being a visualization tool, and are super focused on building customer data infrastructure of the future. This product release is in close partnership with our BI partners (Looker, Mode, Wagon, Periscope, BIME and Chartio). One of the biggest problems our mutual customers face is getting data into their warehouse so that they can use the BI tool in the first place. This launch…
Can someone use Segment to generate per-user reporting data? So, instead of Total Company Sales this Month, I want Bob's Sales, Joe's Sales, etc. It feels like this is just a filter on top of what you already have. Almost like a parameterized query? (pass in @UserId for a where statement) I originally thought maybe this is the job for one of your visualization partners but you really need to filter the results before…
hey vyrotek - you can definitely build that report using Segment sources + BI tool.
Our salesforce source pulls in the Salesforce `Opportunities` and `Users` table (your sales team members). So to get sales by sales rep, you can join the `Opportunities` table to `Users` table, and then aggregate by sales rep.
Once you get the raw data into your data warehouse, you have a ton of flexibility with how you aggregate and analyze it.
Is this just running the SF SoQL statement for you and storing the aggregated result in a Segment table? Or does Segment provide a way to completely clone entire SF tables such as Opportunities & Cases and then create the aggregate queries later in segment?
Great question! When you enable a source, we begin running a job on an interval for you that pulls the data from the source, applies some light normalizations and transformations, and sends the data to our Object API (which is in charge of upserting the data into Segment and flushing it to your warehouse). In Salesforce's case, we issue bulk queries to pull the complete collection on the first run, then modify the qu…
You should make this available for trial. No way I'm paying $449 just to try it.
I set it up with the developer account, but when I try to connect the integration, it says it's not available for the developer plan. I was like "ok, fine, i'll pay 50 bucks to try it" but then it says salesforce is only available on the Growth plan, which is $449.