RudderStack, which provides the first open source alternative to traditional Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), announced that it now provides a SaaS deployment option to customers, making it the first open source CDP vendor to offer multiple hosting options. Customers can choose RudderStack’s SaaS offering without compromising on their security and privacy requirements, as it can run inside the customer’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or RudderStack’s VPC. They can also choose to run RudderStack’s free open source version or the paid enterprise version on-prem. In either scenario, customer data remains under the control of the RudderStack customer.
RudderStack’s SaaS and enterprise offerings incorporate several new features not found in its open-source version, including Teams, SSO, Transformations, Multi-Node, High Availability and Event Replay.
“We had a lot of interest in RudderStack from companies that didn’t want to manage running a CDP,” said Soumyadeb Mitra, CEO of RudderStack. “We developed a SaaS offering to meet that need. Large enterprises can still choose to run our open source or enterprise version on-prem and we’ve made it easy to transition from one to the other as a company grows.”
One of the first enterprises to use RudderStack’s new SaaS offering is India’s leading online healthcare platform 1mg. “1mg generates billions of events each month,” said Gaurav Agarwal, CTO at 1mg. “We wanted a CDP to bring together all this data from our different channels in a unified and consistent way, to create a holistic view of our customer’s behavior and their preferences – while keeping data management overhead to a minimum. With RudderStack, we were able to get a feature-rich SaaS solution that we didn’t have to manage, but hosted in our own VPC. It is perfect for our needs and no other vendor was able to provide this.”
RudderStack’s offering differs from traditional CDPs in several ways:
- Multiple deployment options: Customers can start with the SaaS offering hosted in RudderStack’s VPC (which is simpler to set up and manage) or the customer’s VPC. As their team grows and their security/privacy requirements become more complex, they can take ownership and run it on-prem. No other vendor provides this flexibility.
- Fixed pricing plan: RudderStack’s SaaS offering is not priced by MTUs or events, but rather by infrastructure (compute nodes) provisioned. This gives customers much more control over their costs and enables them to collect a high volume of event data without high expenses.
- Built for engineers: While other CDPs are designed for marketers, RudderStack has added many features designed for engineers – from Kubernetes deployment (for ease of deployment) to Grafana dashboards (for ease of manageability) to Kafka integrations. RudderStack’s system is also designed to handle real-time use cases better, with, for example, real-time data exchange.
This launch follows on the heels of RudderStack’s announcing a $5M seed round led by S28 Capital in May 2020. At the time, RudderStack stated that it would use the funding in part to accelerate product development.
“This is the first of many new and improved product offerings in our pipeline,” said Mitra.
This article originally appeared in MarTech Series.
1 comment