Thread by @hhhypergrowth

The Friday scoop from Forbes played out. $TWLO acquired Segment, a “customer data platform” startup. This adds integration tools, ingest pipelines, customer vision, and analytics into Twilio stack. /1

https://twitter.com/alexrkonrad/status/1315620190328164353

Lawson really clarifies what they went after: “Communications was just the entry point for the real opportunity, which has been really providing a comprehensive platform for customer engagement....”. /2

“... The one thing that’s always been missing from Twilio as we’ve been building up this customer engagement platform is understanding of the end users themselves. We power the communications, but we don’t actually know who the customers are.” /3

So who is Segment? I highlighted them in my $SNOW Snowflake write up, as I really liked their niche. Some bits from that... /4

hhhypergrowth.com/a-snowflake-de…

Segment is an integration provider for data ingest, creating centralized & easily managed pipelines for exporting data out of SaaS applications and into cloud databases. This is greatly simplifying how data movement is handled by data engineers. /5

But Segment goes way beyond ingest; they serve as a data pipeline on BOTH sides of the db, with a specific focus on customer data. Besides pulling data in, they handle pipelines to extract analytical insights OUT of the data warehouse, loading it back into sales & mktg tools. /6

This enables business users to gain enormous insights into customer/shopper/user behaviors, to help with product innovation and marketing efforts. So Segment is all about customer data; ingest pipelines and insight extraction around sales and marketing. /7

Segment also provides software dev tooling in order to integrate with and extract insights from mobile app and website users – which seems similar to $DDOG Datadog's Real User Monitoring (RUM) product. /8

All in all, a facinating pivot by Twilio. They handled communications before w/ no broader view. Now they will handle the data flows and actionable insights around customer data, and integrate w/ all the SaaS tools (Salesforce, Marketo, Snowflake, etc). /9

$TWLO is now becoming a “customer platform”, for handling communications but also for gaining vision into customer behaviors, and for extracting actionable insights back into the tools your teams use. /fin