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API-enabled and API-led. Progressive Stitching the Digital Journey Together

By Chris Detzel posted 05-31-2022 09:12

  

In parts one and two of our Ask Me Anything with founder and CTO Manish Sood, Sood discussed the motivation behind Reltio, integration capabilities, and Reltio security measures. 

In the final part of our blog series, Manish answered more questions from Community members about Reltio, including PII, Reltio capabilities, and the platform's future.

 

As the technology stack allows capturing of real-time PII and non-PII, like cookies, IP addresses, etc., how does Reltio position itself in this space? Are their plans to evolve the platform accordingly, or are there capabilities today that customers can start using to solve some of these problems?

 

Manish Sood: This is a very relevant and timely topic for a couple of reasons. One, how should users manage the entire life cycle from anonymous to known PII type of information? We have a concept of progressive stitching inside Reltio. If we take a step back and think about why we’ve created the Reltio capabilities to be available through an API, it is primarily to stitch the digital journey together. 

In every part of the digital journey, when users visit a website, they are only cookies because they haven’t created a profile by registering it to the site. Those cookies, with some of the minor details of the IP address, and other information, can be instantiated inside Reltio as an unknown profile.

As someone goes through the conversion process and engages in that life cycle, that profile goes from unknown to a known PII profile. Even at that stage, though, the amount of information available is no more than a cookie ID and email address. But stitching together that information and building on it progressively through multiple channels of interaction, they go from registering as a user to actually buying a product, which adds additional information.

This is the concept of progressive stitching. Most data does not come from 50 different sources at once. Users start with a single source, a few elements of the profile attribution, and keep adding more details.

Once customers get an email address and phone number, they can then do more matching and unification at that point, which is how we have been able to help some of our customers. With the evolution of the CDP platforms, more customers are coming to us to better manage and centralize this type of profile information before sending it to marketing systems.

 

APIs need to be very high-performing for Reltio’s vision to be ultimately game-changing. How do you plan to make MDM data available to inline decision-making via APIs?

 

Manish Sood: From day one, when we started Reltio, we said it has to an API-enabled, API-led paradigm because more and more organizations are moving towards the time to action being reduced to milliseconds. There was a time when companies could only act on data seven or 30 days later because they would wait for the data to flow into a data warehouse, and then they would look at it. It was mostly the rearview mirror type of information because the engagement had already happened. But, as we talk to most of our customers, they’re moving towards reducing that time to action and bringing it to the point of engagement.

So our directional goal is to improve our core set of APIs. I don’t just mean APIs that export data out of Reltio. Everything in Reltio is an API, but there is a core set of APIs, like getting, searching, or updating profiles. These are real-time APIs that need a real-time response back, which has to be down to milliseconds. 

That is where we are making additional investments to drive our orientation to be even faster than we are today. We want to help every organization be in that digital forefront where they can impact the experience they’re delivering, whether it’s a supplier, customer, or patient: it has to be the point of engagement.

Some of this comes from customers’ usage patterns, how they’re engaging with us, and asking for better capabilities. However, our internal desire is to have our APIs perform better because we know that every customer has to get to that real-time orientation for their digital business.

 

What is Reltio’s plan to improve support services?

 

Manish Sood: Great question. Some of the feedback we received from customers before 12 months ago was that our support needed a lot of improvement. Over the last couple of years, we invested in not only adding more team members but training them and making our support processes more robust. We have thought through the path to resolving some of the issues and how quickly we respond to customers. A large part of it was training and enabling our own resources to be the trusted extension of a customer’s team, understanding the contextual relevance of the customers' questions. That awareness allows us to lead to the responses faster and better.

Also, constantly getting feedback from our customers has allowed us to improve certain areas. We get feedback on the things they are not seeing yet, whether we haven’t tackled those other parts of the support equation or something that we need to evolve into our support engagement structure. We welcome feedback so that we can further enhance our support capabilities.

 

What is the plan to engage customer-side decision-makers with Reltio? Specifically, QBRs for roadmaps, consultation on new partnerships, etc. What are the mechanisms Reltio is considering?

 

Manish Sood: First, the community is a great way to get input back to Reltio. For example, you have the standard engagement model. As issues come up, you go to support and open up tickets. Our engineering and product management teams review those types of details. But the community is the vehicle where if you have something outside the bounds of a support ticket, please provide a suggestion or discussion in the community to inform our roadmap. On the customer success side, we are in the process of engaging with the customers and their teams on roadmap discussions.

Reltio is a wide platform in terms of capabilities. Often, we find some customers only using a portion of the capabilities. So engagement with CSM teams helps the customers understand some of the opportunities for further adoption with what they already can access. In return, we get feedback on some of the roadmaps. Because it’s not just about the Reltio roadmap, it’s also about your roadmap for the next 12, 18, or 24 months. If we get an understanding of that, then we can look at how to incorporate some of those things into our product roadmap or provide guidance on how we should be jointly solving some of the things that will not fit into a product orientation.

 

If you fast forward five years, how do you see Reltio's vision and market presence? What will you be know for?

 

Manish Sood: Reltio’s mission is to be the real-time operating system for data. When we say data, it is the core data businesses use to run. That includes customer information, product information, supplier information, asset information, and employee information—basically, all the types of data domains relevant to running a business. Given the fragmented or siloed state of the enterprise, there is a dire need to have a central system that will govern, manage, aggregate, unify, and provide a single source of truth for these types of data domains. That is where we see Reltio. My long-term hypothesis about the evolution of the space is that applications will create data to consume data, but they will not be governors or owners of data.

Applications will need data to be available equally across all the different parts of the business process at any given point in time as a real-time asset they tap into or contribute. That will come from the Reltio type of systems that will act as the data plan, a real-time data plane, or a real-time operating system for data. Still, the business processes will contribute or consume information at any given time. Analytics will depend on data coming out of this. Data science will rely on it because this is how the data will become the continuum of everything that we do in the enterprise.


 

Conclusion

 If you missed any other portion of our AMA with Manish Sood, you can read part one  or part two. You can also check out the webinar here or additional questions after the AMA here.

Listen to the entire Ask Me Anything with @Manish Sood below: 



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