Quantum offers the ActiveScale cloud object storage system, acquired from Western Digital February 2020, designed to provide a highly durable, scale-out economic storage system. ActiveScale is a more recent model replacing the former Amplidata Object Storage product line that was acquired by Western Digital from HGST in 2015.
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Twilio Segment
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
Enterprise grade organizations with B2B clientele would be served well by using this product. It alleviates the need for an on-premise storage solution by offering a cloud-based alternative. Smaller organizations with less data capacity needs would be better served with an in-house solution, unless they come out with more reasonable pricing down the road.
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
It has been a fantastic solution, and now it is so highly integrated into our business, it would be difficult to imagine continuing to without it. It is part of our customer contracts as well, and it saves us from having to invest in the on-premise alternative to provide the required storage capacity.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
What sets Amplidata apart is the cloud-based storage capability. We’ve realized cost savings due to the fact that we are no longer housing the data on premise, and clients rest assured that they have greater visibility into their data.
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
Amplidata has enabled us to replace our on-premise data storage for many of our larger clients, thus reducing the cost to deploy and house this ourselves
Clients feel confident in storing their sensitive data with us knowing that they have full management and visibility at their fingertips
The ability to quickly scale allows us to meet the needs of clients of all sizes
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
