How Segment Is Changing the SaaS Marketplace

http://gwintrob.com/articles/how-segment-is-changing-the-saas-marketplace/

by gwintrob • 12 years ago

37 6 12 years ago

sunir• 12 years ago

What's interesting to me is not the wild west of competing analytics tools that Segment rolls up, but the shear array of not-really-analytics tools Segment feeds event tracking and identity to like Marketo, Hubspot, Customer.io, Olark, etc.

gwintrob• 12 years ago

Absolutely, sunir. It becomes even more powerful when these tools start feeding into each other. For example, what if you can identify that one user is having a bad experience based on their Olark conversations and usage data, then put them on a special drip campaign to help them re-engage. Each tool becomes more automated/insightful when it accesses the data from the others.

sudonim• 12 years ago

Exactly Gordon. 10 years ago the goal was to build a monolithic bloatware do-everything product. The future is to pick the best product for each function, and have them all play well together. Segment helps customers have great complementary options to Customer.io which is one of the reasons we encourage them to use it.

Really interesting analysis. Thanks for doing it!

ssiddharth• 12 years ago

I'm really, really sorry that this is a subtle typo/grammar nitpick post. Hailing from a non-English speaking country, I've recently taken to going through HN comments and trying to find issues in order to improve my grasp of the language.

I digress. The word you're looking for is 'sheer', not 'shear'.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

In the same way that online ads have really started to feel the hurt from AdBlockers, I think that trackers are next on that list. There was a really big discussion of uBlock on HN the other day - which blocks Segment, similarly AdBlockPlus (when blocking trackers) does as well.

At this point it's a little more than an annoyance, but it's not hard to imagine a future where these things are baked into browsers and/or legislature puts some hefty restrictions onto them.

jgalt212• 12 years ago

Along these lines, I've noticed that a few banks seem to be blocking Google Analytics. As an interesting aside, we noticed one large bank blocks GA, but not mixpanel. Has anyone else who serves enterprise customers noticed this? If this trend has real legs, we'd need to move back towards server side analytics.

How Segment Is Changing the SaaS Marketplace

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