Why Snowplow Insights is becoming Snowplow BDP (Behavioral Data Platform)
Today we have renamed our commercial product, “Snowplow Insights” to “Snowplow BDP (Behavioral Data Platform)”. In this post, I will share why.
Our product has outgrown its old name
Our product – originally named Snowplow Insights – has never been an insights product, so the old name is not very helpful, and frankly somewhat misleading. Snowplow enables our customers to gain great insight into the behavior of the people that their business interacts with, but it is not an ‘Insights’ product. Snowplow sits upstream from insights development and generates high quality, behavioral data to power advanced analytics, including:
- Descriptive uses of the data: e.g. what are my customers and prospects doing across platforms and channels (Customer 360)?
- Diagnostic uses of the data: e.g. why did my customer churn?
- Predictive uses of the data: e.g. which are the customers that have the highest propensity to buy? Which are the customers who look like they’ll be most valuable over their lifetimes? What is the optimal mix of marketing spend across channels / campaigns to maximize predicted return on marketing spend?
- Prescriptive uses of the data: e.g. automated bidding, dynamic pricing, personalization
- These and many more use cases are enabled by the rich, highly structured, accurate and complete data that Snowplow BDP delivers. However, the actual insight is developed by our customers and users in a combination of AI, BI and data engineering tools.
At Snowplow we have built a Behavioral Data Platform (BDP)
At Snowplow, we believe that Behavioral Data, data that describes what your customers and prospects do on a second-by-second basis, is uniquely valuable for driving deep understanding of those customers, so companies can deliver better value to its customers, and drive competitive advantage for themselves. The world’s leading companies use Behavioral Data to drive best-in-class customer experience, and optimize their customer acquisition, retention and upsell.
Behavioral Data is uniquely valuable, but is also uniquely challenging to generate at a quality level sufficient to allow you to power sophisticated data usage, particularly for AI driven applications. That is on account of:
- Organizational challenges: in an enterprise the data is typically generated by 10s of different data producing teams, processed by other teams and then consumed by multiple different teams. How do you manage consistency of capture so that data can easily be aggregated to build a complete customer view? In the event of a data quality issue, how do you identify which team to work with to resolve the issue, when so many are involved in different parts of the data generation, processing and delivery?
- Compliance challenges: today most organizations collect data from people in different geographies, subject to different laws, under different privacy policies. How do you manage the tension between democratizing that data, and ensuring that each individual’s data is only used in a way that is consistent with the basis on which it was collected?
- Technical challenges: for most organizations, behavioral data is the highest volume highest velocity source of data. How do you drive value from the data in a timely way?
We build technology to solve these problems, so organizations can more readily develop and evolve a behavioral data set to power multiple sophisticated use cases. We enable our customers to spend less time wrangling the data and more time generating great value from it. Snowplow BDP, the Behavioral Data Platform, is a great name for this technology because it accurately describes the functionality and ambition of our product.
We are renaming our commercial product to “Snowplow BDP (Behavioral Data Platform)”
Snowplow BDP is still the same market-leading platform, with our open-source behavioral data engine at its heart. The new name describes much better the great functionality of our evolving platform and the diverse and powerful use cases our customers will drive with it today and in the future.
