Episode 33: Re-inventing Customer Data Infrastructure in the Cloud

Allyson Dietz:

Welcome back to No Hype. In this episode, we're presenting coverage from Brave New Worlds 2024. Brave New Worlds is a unique insider experience that puts TransUnion clients in the same room as leading industry thought leaders to explore the challenges they face, and how they work with their partners – agencies, publishers, MarTech providers, and of course TransUnion – to solve those problems. In just a moment, you'll hear the full recording of one of our panel discussions from the 2024 show titled, “Reinventing Customer Data Infrastructure in the Cloud.” It was moderated by my TransUnion colleague, Gareth Davies, and it features ActionIQ, Horizon Media, and colleagues from the Google Cloud Platform. This is one of my favorite sessions from Brave New Worlds 2024 because of how much ground these panelists were able to cover in just half an hour, from the migration from on-premises data storage to the cloud has revolutionized marketing collaboration, to how the industry should be thinking of CDPs as performance drivers, not call centers. There's a lot to chew on in this episode. So if there's one thing I'm taking away, it's that all companies are data companies. Simple, yes, but an important perspective to keep in mind. So without much further delay, here's Reinventing Customer Data Infrastructure in the Cloud. I hope you enjoy.

Gareth Davies:

Okay, fantastic. So we're going to switch gears a little bit. We're going to go from cars to the cloud. So with that, I'd like to welcome on stage three prestigious guests. Really excited to have them here today. We're going to be joined by Roshni Joshi, who is Managing Director of Customer Engineering at Google; with Katherine Strieder, SVP of Data Innovation and Architecture at Horizon Media; and Justin DeBrabant, CPO at ActionIQ. Welcome on stage.

All right, so we're going to pivot a little bit and kick this off. I want to know what cloud do you fly, and what do you call it? Alright, moving on. Moving on, dad jokes aside. So anyways, shifting gears, I think listen, the theme of cloud has been pretty omnipresent this morning. But I feel like it's also an area that will benefit from demystification, and it'd be great to understand, given who we have on stage here today, I think we bring some exciting perspective. So really keen to see how you think about the opportunities, what this means for everyone here in the room, and ultimately how we should all be walking about thinking about the cloud. So with that, I think let's just tee it up. Let's start by framing, why do we think everyone in this room should care about the cloud, and what impact is it going to have on their business? And maybe Roshni, we'll start with you.

Roshni Joshi:

Sure, thank you first of all for inviting me here. I've been working in the public cloud and hybrid cloud space for the last 10 years or so, and I've gone from seeing people ask the question around, “What is cloud,” to “why cloud,” to “why not cloud,” to now, “cloud first.” And personally it's just a very cool experience because I only get to go to tech conferences. So actually hanging out with you guys, it's a lot of fun. In general, I will say that over the last few years, we've seen an increasing amount of focus from marketeers across multiple different industries and segments build a number of different applications on the cloud. And they’re usually focused on better customer experience, driving more engagement, improving the ROI of their marketing spend. You said something earlier, and I actually got my notes like a dork because I wrote it down. You talked about a higher purpose. How do you connect with the individual? How do you not just drive your sales, but make that deeper connection with them? And that's what we see marketeers doing. In tactical terms or in architectural terms, that means a lot of our marketeers or a lot of companies are building CDPs – platforms to, we use a lot of acronyms, customer data platforms – to unify data across we talked about first-party, second-party, third-party sources. And that is a strong need as you're trying to get to that higher purpose, trying to figure out what is the segmentation, what is the persona and what do I need to serve back to this user? We are also seeing a lot of cloud usage specifically around the data sharing that we mentioned earlier. Features like analytics hub on Google Cloud allow you to share data across organizational boundaries in a privacy-safe manner and a scalable manner, and create those clean rooms that we were mentioning earlier so that you are meeting the compliance that you need to.

And the third one I will talk about in terms of why cloud. All of us have been living in this generative, like this Cambrian explosion of AI and generative AI over the last 18 months or so. And especially with that, we've seen an increased focus on creative content in the cloud, using the leveraging the capabilities of the cloud for creative content. One of my favorite ads from last year was the Coke ad where different historical figures, they used AI to transform them into real life. Anybody know which ad I'm talking about? It was a really one of the first use cases of AI in an ad form. And underlying it was a stable diffusion model, an AI model. But again, we see companies like Jasper and Typeface making that technology available to you at scale. So it is that increased ROI for your marketing spend at a scalable, privacy-safe, secure manner with the investments that all the cloud providers are putting in to offer that foundation back to you so that you don't have to do that undifferentiated heavy lifting. The cloud is a foundation, and you can use it to deploy these features, these capabilities that value-added purpose back and find that higher purpose with your customers.

Gareth Davies:

Fantastic, thank you. Katherine, you have “architect” in your name and title.

Katherine Strieder:

I do.

Gareth Davies:

And I think we were at dinner the other night and you talked about Horizon being a feelings organization, and bringing data and technology…

Katherine Strieder:

Well, an agency.

Gareth Davies:

Yeah, exactly. I really like that. I think it is the first time I heard that framing. But what does it mean for you to bring the cloud to an agency business, and what does it mean to architect, strategies and data to solve problems?

Katherine Strieder:

Right. That's actually a great way to put the question because as we were talking about before, my background is actually much more in SaaS and places like DoubleClick, Adobe and Viacom. And so you phrase it perfectly when you talk about bringing the cloud to agencies. So I think agencies, our main job is not to own identity or anything like that. It's to provide media services and the concept of what media services is has changed and evolved a lot in the last five to 10 years. So we find ourselves often in the position now of needing to provide, or of having the privilege actually of being able to provide,  recommendations to brands on, okay, you guys have done a great job of realizing the importance of your data and of starting to pull it together, and now you want to explore different ways to use it as marketers.

And our job as an agency, as a services provider now, is to provide some options on that. And to me as a technologist, the cloud is sort of like a no-brainer. It's technological evolution, and we've seen it happen one thing after another, year after year. I was talking with Roshni about this. We are cloud-agnostic, we use everything. But one of the things in terms of being a service provider that it's now our role to do is to help brands understand what the cloud is, and that they don't necessarily have to be worried if they're a brick-and-mortar shop about putting their data on AWS. In the end, they can still make that choice if that's the way their CEO feels or whatever. But it is its own set of solutions, its own infrastructure. And then to demystify it, I was going to wear this T-shirt I have, but my son would've made fun of me, he’s 13. It says, “It's not the cloud, it's just someone else's computer.” I actually think that's a really helpful way to think about it. Not that it's someone else's and they're taking all of your stuff, but it's just a new technological evolution that makes data more exchangeable and more usable. And it's as simple as that and as demystified as that. So yeah, maybe I should have worn it.

Gareth Davies:

We all need that T-shirt. I like it. And Justin, leading product at a customer data platform, how do you think about the cloud, and what does that mean for your business and your customers?

Justin DeBrabant:

Yeah, I mean our product offering is in the cloud. It's always been in the cloud. We connect to data sources that are both on-prem and cloud. And I think that that's important too, kind of embracing wherever customers are in that journey. But back to your question, I think I agree with a lot of the points I hear. Cloud just enables a level of agility that isn't possible with on-prem. I started my career with background in databases, did a PhD back when you actually had to manage appliances and data centers. I managed data teams where we owned data centers. It's really hard, it's really cumbersome. All that's been abstracted away. That enables a lot more agility within the organization. So you can really kind of focus on higher-order, more value-add problems, and focus the business there. And I think that's generally a good thing. And I think that it's not about cloud versus not cloud, it's just about enabling the business to be more agile.

And the other thing I'd say is that cloud is where the innovation is happening. I mean we're backed by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and I'm part of a lot of portfolio company conversations. I've never talked to a company where they're launching their product as kind of an on-prem only offering, right? That's not how it works anymore. So I think you would miss out on that innovation ecosystem if you were beholden to kind of the old on-prem environment. That said, again, I think it's a balance and it's a journey, and it's not about getting to the cloud as fast as humanly possible. I think it's about understanding where there's going to be a positive ROI, a positive impact to your business in migrating data and services to the cloud, and focusing there. And again, it's really about the ROI to the business. The cloud is really just an implementation detail and an enabler, but it costs money. It's not about ROI in and of itself, it's the things you do on top of it.

Gareth Davies:

So the cloud's really just someone else's computer or computers, lots of 'em. It brings a lot more agility. It's clearly a pattern that we're seeing across pretty much every industry. But there's still I think confusion and a lack of clarity around what those opportunities are, and potentially concerns. So I'm going to open it up, and whoever wants to jump in here. What are the biggest concerns that you see that create resistance or drag for organizations embracing the cloud? And ultimately, how do you get around that? How do you help people get comfortable with the uncertainty and the change that comes from them?

Katherine Strieder:

I'm thinking also not just of my time at an agency now, but at Adobe. Something you said made me think of this. It is true that you’ve gotta meet clients where they're at. And some clients, just for various reasons – finance, pharmaceuticals, etc. – they've got certain regulatory reasons or certain internal practices where they have to have a certain amount of stuff on-prem. But then the way I see it, we as an agency can help them figure out how to anonymize, expose, how to integrate with whatever they've got on-prem, and integrate that with solutions that are more flexible and agile in the cloud. And that's not actually that hard to do. I mean, a lot of it is just about connectivity and services. So it's a pretty flexible world. I mean, that does make it a more complex world, but I do think that it's important to acknowledge that you're going to come up with all different kinds of solutions based on where your client's at. And it's not like all or nothing in terms of cloud, it's just understanding what it can do and how easily it can make things work, but also respecting the company's needs around compliance, privacy, etc.

Gareth Davies:

And I'll open this up actually, I'll come into you in a moment, Justin, because I think the CDP angle is quite interesting. I want to understand the interaction. But Roshni, how do you think, and Katherine as well, how do you think about use cases? So we have this concept of the cloud. What are the use cases that as a marketer, I'm going to create competitive advantage. I'm going to be able to unlock something that wasn't possible before. What are those first use cases that are the gateway drug for marketers in the enterprise to say, “Hey, you know what, this isn't just a technology investment, but this is a new way of operating that is going to help me better understand and reach my customers.”

Roshni Joshi:

I think the one thing I wanted to, you sort of touched on it, it's the ROI not just of what you are spending on the cloud. I'll get to your right question, but I wanted to touch on the ROI itself of use cases or otherwise. It's not just the immediate spend on the cloud, but it's also what you derive from the cloud not just in the immediate short term, not in the 12-month window, but the ongoing benefits that you get from the cloud as well as the ongoing ROI over a longer time horizon. Because the innovation and the pace of product and feature release that you see going on around us right now, it's just going to be unparalleled because most of the hyperscalers and the larger cloud solution providers have the investment, have the funding to be able to invest like that to give you those feature capabilities.

Going back to use cases. I think the ones that become those sort of, why can we not do this on the cloud or why can we only do this on the cloud rather, it is the use cases that will allow you to mesh together data from many different places and combine that with insights and AI that you can drive with using AI that you can drive back to your consumers, back to your users. I think it's very difficult. And I've lived in an on-prem world for a long time in my career. I've worked with many customers selling on-prem data center solutions, and it's very hard to create those environments where you can safely share information, share data, and drive the fusion unification of that first party, second party and third party. So that I think is a clear sort of differentiator for cloud. And the second one I think is leveraging AI – leveraging AI to create content, leveraging AI for connectivity and collaboration, leveraging AI for that connection that we talked about to understand the sentiment of your customers using cognition, and deriving what is it that you want to message them through what platform at what time. That is something that, not that you can't do it at another place, but cloud really simplifies it for you and removes the plumbing so that you can just focus on the message that you need to send to your customer.

Gareth Davies:

Yeah, I love that. As a GCP customer, but as a partner to GCP AWS, Snowflake, all the clouds, I just think the pace in terms of building products, the pace of innovation, and the ecosystem of partners, it is really exciting as a technologist and as a builder and certainly data sharing and access we believe has a really incredible opportunity in the cloud. So all of that resonates.

Let's talk a bit about the CDP if we can, Justin. So how do you think about that? Because I think traditionally, the customer data platform was maybe, I don't know, five, you are the expert, but let's say five to seven years ago, there was a vision of customers primarily, I believe, for their own and operated customer data. So let's say a retailer, a Nike or the ones to bring all of that rich site and app-level engagement and commerce data and bring it together, the CDP was framed as a destination as the source of truth for a lot of that data. And I think we're starting to see that shift to the cloud as the hub. So what does that mean for the CDP? Where does that create opportunity, where does that force the shift in your business?

Justin DeBrabant:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I would say the CDPs were almost always cloud-based when they started, but it's about who owns the infrastructure and where does that data live. There's many flavors of cloud and everybody has their own. But yeah, there's been a huge shift. So I've been at ActionIQ, I was actually a first employee, so we've been in business almost 10 years now. So for better for worse, I've seen the whole evolution of the CDP space. Originally when we started, the vision was always democratizing data to the non-technical themes. All of the early people at the company, our CEO, myself, our CTO, came from the database space. We'd spent the first 10 to 15 years of the big data revolution deploying technology for the sake of technology. In the CI organization, I had a consulting company, I did probably 50 different projects with CIOs doing a lot of Hadoop deployments and early cloud migrations. We never talked about the use cases and ultimately who was going to leverage this on the business side. We just never talked about it. It was technology for the sake of technology. Now it was a good foundation and it needed to be built, but it felt like there was a disconnect, right? And technology for the sake of technology is still a cost center. It's not helping drive revenue. There's potential, but it's not actually doing anything. So when we started ActionIQ in the early stages of the CDP space, it was always about democratizing data. But at the time, data was still all over the organization. You might've had a marketing data mart, you might've had email like an ESP clicks and opens in one vendor, digital clickstream data and another vendor. And so almost kind of as a means to an end, we had to be the infrastructure to consolidate that together, create that customer 360. And yes, we did that in our cloud environment. If that had been available on the client's side of things, we would've been able to leverage it, but it wasn't. So in the early stages of the CDP space, it really was about consolidated data, creating that customer 360, and then enabling the business to be able to tap into that to drive better customer experiences. But it always felt like the management of the data on our side was kind of a means to an end. It was an implementation detail. It was often where we differentiated, but not really where we added the value. And coming from the data space, I saw the writing on the wall, you saw the maturity of the cloud data warehouses, Snowflake and Databricks and BigQuery and Redshift and everybody consolidating and migrating to the cloud. And I think in the last couple of years there's been a critical adoption to that in the enterprise, which is where we focus.

And so we bet pretty heavily that customers are not going to want to spend tens of millions of dollars consolidating all their data into this cloud data warehouse, and then to have the CDP come in and say, great, good job. We're going to copy that data into our infrastructure and our own cloud environment. I had those conversations. They didn't always go well. And so we really started to embrace this mindset of, we need to move the application and the code to the data. We need to come in and complement the client's investments and their cloud data warehouse. We need to be agnostic to the cloud. If they've gone all in on Google or all in on AWS or Azure for whatever reason, we don't need to talk them out of that and convince them why our cloud is better. We just need to embrace them where they're at.

So that's really been the journey for the last couple of years in this shift towards kind of composability in the CDP space about embracing that trend, leveraging the investments that the clients are making and coming in and complementing where they're at in that journey. Now that said, having come from the data side of things, these cloud data migrations and data warehouses in general are never done. So it's not going to be a point of time. It's not like in 2025, everybody's going to be done. And so it's a spectrum of all on-prem, all cloud, and you need to meet the client where they're at in that. And I think we're already. also even in the cloud bucket, you're starting to see fracturing where people have Databricks for some workloads and Snowflake for some workloads and Confluent Kafka for other workloads and BigQuery maybe for a team over here for their digital analytics. And so from our perspective, you're seeing this fracturing of different infrastructure that houses different parts of data, and that's great. We want to be able to embrace all those different systems, still be able to deploy in a composable fashion and meet them wherever they're at in that journey, and be able to evolve as they evolve their data strategy over time. So our vision has never changed, but the implementation detail and the architecture behind it has pivoted pretty drastically in the last couple of years.

Gareth Davies:

Yeah, that's fascinating to see a whole category of vendors embrace that concept of composable. “We're going to bring our technology and our capabilities to the cloud” is really radical. You don't see that in a lot of industries.

Justin DeBrabant:

Not everybody's embracing it. I think there's a good half of, I think the wrong half of the category that are actively kind of, they don't have the architecture or the vision to really execute on it. And so they're convinced that this kind of more bundled non-composable approach is still the best way. But the other thing that I would say talking about broader trends that has happened in our space and I think is happening in enterprises in general right now, is that the CIO has become more of the buyer for the CDP. We only sold to CMOs; the first five or six years, only to CMOs. Now over half of our deals are CIO-driven, and that is increasing. And what's happening is CIOs are kind of realizing that CDPs are platform technology and they should be buying it. But what's also happening is tighter collaboration between the CMO and the CIO. I think for a while, the CMO is just off buying data technology and infrastructure because it was under the radar. And now there's a much tighter collaboration between those two executives, and that's driving kind of a shift in this architecture and this strategy as well.

Gareth Davies:

Brilliant. I'd love to dig into that, and I'm going to make this a two-part question. So if we're starting to see, or to what degree, and I like to pose both to Katherine and to Roshni, how do you see the coming together of the enterprise technology, whether it's the CTO, CIO, CISO and the marketing organization, and what is the role of identity in the mix in the equation here?

Katherine Strieder:

Well, I think mean one of the things that's interesting is when you think about agencies as a media service provider, they didn't always have CIOs. And the concept of having a thought center and a technology center that provides some of the connectivity and some of the services that the agency provides, that's a relatively new concept that agencies are still getting used to. That technology, and there's just certain foundational things around data that basically any company needs now, whether you're a brand, a content provider, an agency, etc. It's like having a legal department or having a finance department. You need to have a sort of data management department, and there's just certain standardized things you do there. And in terms of the coming together, first of all, the existence of that role in more organizations, which is good, along with the existence of a privacy role, and then the coming together of those roles, I actually think that that's been a really sort of powerful and exciting thing to see. I will say as agencies, because we're a service provider, we've been a little bit more of a fast follower on that. I think I've seen the brands and the content providers really start to do that first where they were like, “Oh, wait a minute, our marketing strategy should not be that different from how we think about buying tech, which should not be that different from how we think about what's happening with consumers on the ground.” And so we sort of fast-followed into that space.

But in terms of identity, I could talk about this for hours, but I think that speaking to someone who's been in the digital space for a long time, especially with programmatic, the way it was implemented, for better or for worse, a lot of young folks, myself included, without the sort of benefit of looking at how other industries had done things and looking to very quickly and very tech-only-focused encompassed solutions, we over indexed, I think on third-party cookies, etc. I think we're learning as an industry now, we're maturing to the point where the technology's available, including cloud-based technology, where we can really start to think a lot more smartly about identity. And I loved the keynote at the beginning because I just very fundamentally believe that our industry is consumer-driven and technological innovation-driven. That's it. We need to follow consumers where they're going. And when I see what my kids are doing online, the way they're engaging, I'm like, okay, that's where we need to be buying in 5 years. And it's very different from the way that we were engaging 10 years ago. So I actually am pretty excited about what we can do to cross-pollinate information in the cloud, in privacy-secure ways across companies, across even the walled gardens, etc. I'm really, really excited about that. And I also am a big believer in data science. AI is a phase of an evolution of data science. So I think the heart, I think there's a lot we can do without actually having to know exactly who every consumer is. There's a lot of exciting things we can do, and we can do them in the cloud. So that's kind of how I feel about identity.

Gareth Davies:

Great. Well, thank you. We're up on time. So we're going to do one-line answers. We're going to do a quick-fire round. I'd love to leave us on one contrarian point of view that may be non-obvious around the cloud. I'm going to start with you, Roshni.

Roshni Joshi:

Oh, it's not contrarian as much as it is the truth, but maybe not a well-established truth. Cloud providers are not stealing your data. We want to host your data. We will love it, we will safeguard it. We will put it on a scalable platform, but we have no need to look into it. In fact, we cannot Google Cloud Platform, for example, encrypts your data end-to-end addressed and in motion. So we don't want to see your data, not your user data, not your enterprise data, not your customer data, not your employee data, none of it. It's yours. It belongs to you. We love it. We store it. We process it just like you asked us to process it. You said one line, but that was longer.

Gareth Davies:

I love it. Katherine, give me one line.

Katherine Strieder:

So I don’t if this is contrarian, but it's true, which I love that you said that. Data technology is always going to be evolving. So I love that you made the point earlier that it is never done. So the sort of expectation I set with my engineering team is we are always rebuilding. We're always going to be reinventing or evolving some part of the stack. Just deal with it. Also, engineers actually kind of love that, right? The challenge I've had, and I've talked with some of the people in the room about this, is that sometimes it scares businesses, the fact that data evolves and changes. So I guess I would say think of that as a fun thing. That's my contrarian view.

Gareth Davies:

I love the optimist.

Justin DeBrabant:

I would say that brands, brand products and services matter increasingly little moving forward. I think all the most successful companies will be centered in some way, shape or form around data. How they could collect that first-party data, and then how they leverage it to build better products and services, but then also monetize that in other unique ways. Everybody's becoming a data company, whether they admit it or not. And even some of the most classic iconic brands out there or not immune to these shifts.

Gareth Davies:

There we go. We're all data companies. You heard it. Thank you so much.

Allyson Dietz:

Once again, that was Gareth, Justin, Katherine, and Roshni. If you'd like to explore more of what Brave New World has to offer, you can listen to all these sessions on demand at bravenewworlds.transunion.com. And don't forget, it's not the cloud, it's just someone else's computer. Thank you for listening.