mParticle acquires Indicative to address data entropy

Over the past 8 years, mParticle has been helping brands solve foundational customer data challenges centered around data quality, governance, and connectivity.  mParticle helps teams accelerate the time to data value, and today marks a significant step forward in our journey. I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve completed the acquisition of Indicative, a customer journey analytics platform.

I’ve known Jeremy Levy, the CEO and cofounder of Indicative for several years and I’ve long admired the impressive platform and credibility his team had built within the community of data professionals championing the modern data stack. I couldn’t be more excited for our teams to join forces.

A common problem that many teams face is that while data tracking plans start small, and the collection of tools that teams use to leverage that data is manageable to begin with; over time, more objects, more use cases, and more tools are added to the stack. On top of that, new privacy constraints constantly change the rules of engagement. Data quality begins to become a victim to growth and success of teams across the org, until ultimately data trust erodes entirely.

Ultimately, teams need to solve for data trust with the complexity of scale.

mParticle and Indicative share the vision that empowering marketing, product, and data teams with high quality customer data, combined with better interfaces is the key to delivering next-generation, adaptive customer experiences.

mParticle has been focused on helping teams build the foundation for digital success by solving underlying challenges around data quality, governance, transformation, and connectivity.

Indicative offers several visualization capabilities including unique Multipath Funnel capabilities, providing teams the ability to compare various conversion paths across different segments, and identify key behaviors that impact conversion.

With the combined capabilities, teams now have a variety of workflows by which they can operationalize their analytics without sacrificing data quality, or violating privacy constraints. Whether that begins with data exploration, or configuring an audience journey in mParticle, teams can easily understand key moments in the customer journey, and seamlessly operationalize the insights and underlying segments.

Some common use cases that are easily operationalize include:

• Defining the most common paths to conversion, and connecting the users within those segments to various marketing partners such as Braze, Iterable, or various Social platforms.
• Identifying where there is inefficiency in the conversion path, and running an experiment with the users who are in these cohorts by connecting this data to an experimentation engine such as Dynamic Yield.
• Determining which people are engaging with a specific feature, and providing them with a personalized offer via an integration with a loyalty vendor such as SessionM.
• Ingesting campaign and experiment data from various SaaS tools, and combining that data in order to get closed-loop operational analytics. 

Indicative’s interface makes it easy to answer these questions without requiring SQL or code, combined with mParticle’s catalog of over 300+ integrations, empowers teams across the org to access rich insights and easily operationalize data in real-time. This accelerates the speed by which data can be operationalized by removing bottlenecks from resource constraints.

The Cambrian explosion of digital data has fueled the growth of cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and BigQuery. As a result, an entire ecosystem of tools built to get data in and out of the warehouse have arisen to form a reference architecture, often coined the “modern data stack”. mParticle with Indicative fills a critical role in the modern data stack by addressing three key areas required to better address both the technical as well as the business challenges:

Better interfaces

When the data warehouse acting as the system of record combines with the CDP serving as the system of data movement, teams only have to map data once, between the data warehouse source and mParticle, and can connect it anywhere while solving for data quality and governance along the way. As new events are instrumented, new use cases emerge, or new tools need to be added, non-technical users can leverage no-code interfaces to activate data without having to write SQL scripts. 

Additionally, with mParticle Audiences and Calculated Attributes, marketers can automatically create dynamically computed attributes such as Average Order Value, and easily incorporate these attributes into audiences and journeys.

Better integration support

Combining Indicative’s rich integration library with mParticle’s existing integration library, provides teams with the most complete catalog of integrations of any offering on the market. In combination, we are the only customer data platform (CDP) to offer a full set of native integrations for real-time, bi-directional connectivity with cloud data warehouses, providing flexibility to support a wide range of deployment models and use cases.

Real-time personalization

mParticle’s real-time capabilities help teams at leading brands enable real-time use cases for personalized, adaptive CX. Developers can now intelligently unify customer data from both native client-side apps as well as cloud data warehouses, and stream or segment the data to support both batch and real-time use cases across mParticle’s 300+ pre-built integrations to SaaS tools. Teams also benefit from natively integrated data quality, transformations, and governance capabilities to help protect data integrity and reliability along the entire journey.

mParticle and Indicative are both deeply committed to helping teams solve data entropy, and delivering a joint solution that addresses needs along the entire data maturity curve. 

As we integrate the platforms, Indicative and mParticle will remain available in an unbundled capacity as well.  Our integration work will make the power of the combined offering available to all mParticle and Indicative customers, and we have planned a multi-phased integration effort that we are excited to share with you.

To continue the conversation, please join Jeremy, Chee, and myself in an upcoming “meet the founders” chat to discuss our shared vision and roadmap.